rwanda civil war

Like many other African civil wars in recent decades,the civil war in Rwanda had its roots both in precolo-nial history and in misguided or maliciously guidedcolonial policies. The tiny country of Rwanda (some10,000 square miles) is naturally a kind of Eden. Situ-ated about a mile high on the equator, it is both wellwatered and beautiful. The altitude keeps it relativelycool and also keeps at bay certain pests dangerous tohumans and animals—specifically, the malaria-carry-ing mosquito and the cattle-killing tsetse fly.

Historical Background

This idyllic setting has drawn people from across sub-Saharan Africa for thousands of years. Scholars specu-late that of the six to seven different socioculturalgroups inhabiting Rwanda, the first inhabitants werethe Twa—also known as Pygmies—who have dwelledin the extensive upland rain forests that have coveredthe northern Great Lakes region of Central and East

Africa since prehistoric times. These people were fol-lowed by Bantu-speaking Hutu, a largely agriculturalpeople who settled in the region more than a thousandyears ago, and the Tutsi, a largely pastoral people whomoved into the area perhaps 500 years ago. By mod-ern times, Hutu accounted for about 84 percent of thepopulation, and the Tutsi 15 percent. The Twa hadbeen largely displaced by the newcomers, accountingfor less than 1 percent of the total.

Partly because precolonial Rwanda was such acrowded and intensively farmed place, it developed auniquely centralized and ordered form of govern-ment. At the center of political life was the king, whowas believed to have divine origins, and his court.Beneath the king was an elaborate political structureof chiefs and subchiefs who had a number of duties,including the regulation of economic and political af-fairs, the collection of tribute and taxes, and recruit-ment and training for the army.

The Rwandans developed a feudal social and eco-nomic order in which the cattle-owning warrior class ofTutsi acted as lords and the agricultural Hutu served asserfs. Still, these labels can be misleading. Many Hutuserved in the king’s army and were rewarded with cat-tle, while most Tutsi were just as poor as their Hutuneighbors and tilled the fields beside them. Indeed,there was a certain amount of upward and downwardmobility. In the years just before the arrival of Europe-ans, however, the Banyinginya dynasty was confiningthe Hutu to more feudal obligations and providingthem with less freedom to move upward. Indeed, moveswere made to ban Hutu from owning cattle altogether.

Colonial Rwanda

When European colonial powers were dividing upAfrican territories, Rwanda fell to Germany in 1890.

RWANDA: Civil War and Genocide Since 1991TYPE OF CONFLICT: Ethnic and ReligiousPARTICIPANTS: Congo (Zaire); Uganda

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UGANDA

RWANDA

BURUNDITANZANIA

DEMOCRATICREPUBLICOF CONGO

(ZAIRE)

0

0 50 100 Kilometers

50 100 Miles

Kigali

RwandesePatriotic

Front

BukavuButare

Bujumbura

Gikongoro

Kibuye

LakeVictoria

LakeEdward

LakeKivu

LakeTanganyika

Rwanda: Civi l War and Genocide Since 19 91 259

KEY DATES

1918 Belgians take over the colony of Rwanda from the defeated Ger-mans; over the next forty-four years, Belgians will favor minorityTutsi over majority Hutu, creating resentment among the lattergroup.

1962 Rwanda wins independence from Belgium with the Hutu partyin power; thousands of Tutsi flee violence in the country.

1990 Militants of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), mainly Tutsi exilesin Uganda, launch an invasion of Rwanda, in an effort to over-throw the repressive Hutu government of General Juvenal Hab-yarimana.

1990–1992 With the help of France, the Rwandan army expands to 50,000troops to fight off the RPF.

1992 The Habyarimana government and the RPF sign a peace accordin Tanzania, but continuing violence in Rwanda prevents its im-plementation.

1993 Fighting in neighboring Burundi leads to massacres of both Tutsiand Hutu in that Tutsi-led country; 300,000 Burundian Huturefugees pour into Rwanda, inflaming Hutu feelings against Tutsi.

1994 In April, Habyarimana flies to Tanzania to explain to Africanleaders why the peace accord has not been implemented; on hisreturn on April 6, his plane is shot down over the Rwandan capi-tal of Kigali; Hutu extremists immediately blame Tutsi militantsand call on Hutu people to massacre Tutsi; between early Apriland early June, Hutu—urged on by extremist politicians—massacre an estimated 800,000 Tutsi and their Hutu sympathiz-ers in the worst genocide in world history since the Cambodiangenocide of the 1970s; while the whole world does almost noth-ing to stop the killings, the massacres only come to an end whenRPF forces enter Kigali; hundreds of thousands of Hutu—including many leaders of the genocide—flee the country, mostlyto Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).

1998 In an effort to prevent a Hutu revival and to stop cross-borderraids by Hutu militants, the Tutsi-led Rwandan government in-vades Congo, setting off a rebellion that overthrows the govern-ment of that country.

2001 The government of Rwanda institutes a traditional system ofpopular participatory justice to deal with a massive backlog ofcases against those who participated in the genocide.

Early German visitors took note of the extensive andintensive farming, made possible by the benign cli-mate and topography. They also studied the largepopulation and identified the leading ethnic or socialgroups. They observed that the Tutsi and the Hutuseemed to be quite distinct and recognizable physicaltypes and noticed the elaborate social order that hadbeen created.

Following racial beliefs then widely held in Eu-rope and North America, German colonial leadersconcluded that the Rwandan social order was basedentirely on race. Because many Tutsi leaders were talland thin and had aquiline features (more like Europe-ans), the Europeans judged them to be superior to theHutu, whose body shapes and features were less Eu-ropean. Colonial powers were much slower to recog-nize the widespread intermingling and intermarriagebetween Tutsi and Hutu or their shared Bantu-typelanguage.

During World War I, Belgium (already a colonialpower in Africa) drove German authorities out ofRwanda and took charge. At the end of the war, Bel-gium was given official responsibility for the colony.Based on the same racial assumptions as the Germansmade earlier, the Belgian administration saw the Tutsileaders as far more intelligent than the Hutu and gavethem far more extensive power, putting the full powerof the colonial regime behind them and absolving themfrom any need for consultation with village leaders(including the Hutu). Indeed, the old order, in whichHutu chiefs managed the lands and Tutsi chiefs theherds, was replaced by one directed by a single chiefadministrator, invariably a Tutsi.

Not surprisingly, the Tutsi used this power to gainadvantage by seizing Hutu property. When farmingenterprises were commercialized and woven into theimperialist economy, the Hutu were turned into akind of rural proletariat. In other enterprises, theywere kept down by the old feudal practices more thor-oughly codified and rigidly enforced. This treatmentleft the Hutu increasingly frustrated and angry.

Gradually, both the Hutu and the Tutsi began toaccept the Belgians’ distorted and simplified gloss ontheir own history, culture, and social order. The Tutsicame to believe that they were, in fact, superior, witha natural right to rule over the Hutu, while the Hutucame to believe they were indeed a peaceful, agricul-tural people who had been conquered by the strongerand more aggressive Tutsi. Even so, the seeds of re-sentment between the groups had been planted.

Independence

After World War II, the Tutsi elite, wealthier andmore educated than the vast majority of Hutu, weremuch better situated to comprehend the politicalideas sweeping Africa. They understood that Africanindependence was coming in the not-too-distant fu-ture, but they also understood that their superior posi-tion in Rwanda could be jeopardized if the countrybecame a broad-based democracy, since Hutu voterswould make an overwhelming majority. In the 1950s,as the Belgians began to prepare for independence bygiving greater local powers to Africans, the Tutsi elitemanipulated the system to ensure themselves a domi-nant position in an independent government.

The Roman Catholic Church, which had becomea powerful force in Rwanda, had begun with thesame admiration for the Tutsi felt by colonial lead-ers, but gradually it was changing its allegiance. Asthe Tutsi increasingly challenged European clericsfor control of the Church, those clerics began to rec-ognize the injustice being done to the Hutu. Indeed,the Church had long represented the only path toeducation, better economic position, and higher sta-tus for aspiring Hutu. By the mid-1950s, the Churchhad nurtured a Hutu counterelite that challengedTutsi economic dominance and the right of the Tutsielite to inherit the colonial administration uponindependence.

This development produced a Tutsi backlash, andcompetition between the two groups became increas-ingly bitter as they fought over the symbolic trap-pings of power. More substantial developments werealso occurring in the political arena on the eve of inde-pendence. In June 1957, Grégoire Kayibanda foundedthe country’s first political party, the MuHutu SocialMovement (MSM), largely based in the central andnorthern parts of the country. The group later becamethe MSM/Party of the Movement and of Hutu Eman-cipation and was known as PARMEHUTU for short.Only months later, another Hutu, businessman JosephGitera, formed the Association for the Social Promo-tion of the Masses (APROSOMA), which soon becamethe party of Hutu from the southern region.

Meanwhile, the Tutsi were organizing politicalparties as well. The more conservative elements estab-lished the strongly monarchical, anti-Belgian Rwan-dese National Union (UNAR), while liberals foundedthe Rwandese Democratic Assembly (RADER). Thelatter group advocated social equality and cooperation

260 Africa, Sub- Saharan

between Hutu and Tutsi, but few Hutu joined it, dis-trusting its Tutsi majority.

Rhetoric between these parties reached a feverpitch by late 1959, and tension in the country in-creased to the breaking point. A Hutu subchief wasattacked by the Tutsi group UNAR, and fightingbroke out between Hutu and Tutsi in various parts ofthe country. Some 300 people were killed, and manyTutsi homes were destroyed. Meanwhile the struggleintensified between the Hutu and Tutsi elites. TheHutu demanded that the colonial Belgian regimeestablish a broad-based government with majorityrule before independence was declared. The Tutsi de-manded immediate independence, saving questionsabout the permanent government for later discussion.

The Belgians increasingly backed the Hutu andbegan to replace Tutsi chiefs with Hutu leaders. Therewere several reasons for doing so. First, their relationswith the Tutsi had become more and more confronta-tional, as the Tutsi demanded to be given the prefer-ence they had enjoyed for decades. Second, governmentand business interests came to believe that the Hutuwould be more pliable rulers, allowing Belgians tocontinue managing the country’s economic affairs.Finally, in the intense cold-war atmosphere of thetime, the Tutsi elite, who were vocally anticolonial-ist, had attracted the support of Communist regimes,which persuaded the Belgians and other Westernpowers that the Hutu might be less dangerous. Thusthe Tutsi, who were more reactionary than Marxist,were perceived as allies by leftist governments and asenemies by the colonial powers.

Despite the growing state of insecurity, the Bel-gians organized local elections in June and July 1960in preparation for independence. Relying on the largeHutu majority, PARMEHUTU won overwhelmingly.This victory allowed the Belgian administration to an-nounce that the “social revolution” was complete, sincethe majority Hutu were taking control of the country.In fact, the new Hutu elite were already encouragingattacks on impoverished Tutsi in the countryside.

The international reaction to Rwanda’s electionswas not positive. Both the United Nations and theCommunist bloc feared that Hutu rule would allowthe Belgians to continue to call the shots in Rwanda.Thus they supported the more radically anticolonial-ist UNAR Tutsi party to lead the country. A confer-ence to reconcile the Hutu and Tutsi was held inBelgium but made little progress. Grégoire Kay-ibanda of PARMEHUTU announced a “legal coup,”

asserting that Rwanda had established its indepen-dence. As the violence continued, legislative electionswere held. Another PARMEHUTU landslide gave itcontrol of the legislature. Tutsi began emigrating toneighboring countries in large numbers. In the midstof this anarchic and violent situation, independencewas formally declared on July 1, 1962. Since the lastking had died without an heir, the new country be-came a republic under the presidency of Kayibanda ofthe PARMEHUTU Party.

Kayibanda and HabyarimanaRegimes

Rwanda in the Kayibanda years (1962–1973) was arather strange place. The president ruled much as thekings of old had, appointing favorites to administer thevarious regions but also relying on elaborate allianceswith local chiefs to ensure social peace. There wasmuch talk of egalitarian social and ethnic order, but thecountry was run by a secretive clique of Hutu elites,the Akazu, who monopolized much of the country’slimited commercial potential. At the same time, hav-ing been saved by the Belgians, the Hutu governmentof Kayibanda did not enthusiastically join in the gen-eral African trend toward anticolonial leftist politics.

Meanwhile, the rise to power of PARMEHUTUand the continuing Hutu violence against Tutsi led toa massive emigration. In a continuous stream between1959 and 1964, some 336,000 “official” refugees hadfled. The largest number, about 200,000 traveled toBurundi in the South. (Like Rwanda, Burundi was aBelgian colony divided between a Hutu majority anda Tutsi minority.) More than 100,000 fled north andeast to the former British colonies of Uganda and Tan-ganyika (now Tanzania). Many more Tutsi may havefled without official recognition. Some estimates of to-tal emigration run as high as 775,000, about half ofthe Tutsi population of Rwanda. The Tutsi refugeesfrom Rwanda were known for three things. First, theygained success in their adopted countries, thanks totheir education and entrepreneurial instincts. Second,they maintained an almost mythic connection to theirhomeland, which, over decades, parents would pass onto their children. The exiles in Uganda droppedFrench as their second language and adopted English,yet they never lost their sense of belonging toRwanda. Third, the refugee Tutsi continued to launchineffective attacks against Rwanda. The first of thesecame even before independence, in the form of raids


from Uganda that more resembled looting expedi-tions than guerrilla warfare. A more substantial butpoorly organized invasion from Burundi nearlyreached the capital, Kigali, but was driven back bythe Rwandan army.

A more formidable force developed in Ugandawhen the brutal Idi Amin ruled that country. In 1980,the Rwandan refugees in Uganda formed the militantRwandese Alliance for National Unity (RANU),which demanded the right to return to a safe and se-cure Rwanda. When Amin was overthrown, Uganda’snew dictator, Milton Obote, drove RANU out ofUganda. Even so, many of the militants stayed behind,joining up with an anti-Obote guerrilla group, theNational Resistance Army (NRA), headed by formerdefense minister Yuweri Museveni. As the Rwandanexiles gained battlefield experience, they came to dom-inate the officer corps of the Ugandan resistance move-ment. In early 1986 Museveni captured the capital,Kampala, and overthrew the old regime. More Rwan-dans were recruited for the new national army ofUganda.

Though appreciative of the Rwandans’ help, Mu-seveni was also worried about their dominance in thearmy. The Rwandans began planning a radical solu-tion to their exile. At a congress in 1987, RANUchanged its name to the Rwandese Patriotic Front(RPF) and dedicated itself to returning to Rwanda,by the use of force if necessary.

Meanwhile in Kigali, the cliquish, secretive, andreactionary regime of Kayibanda had been over-thrown. In July 1973, General Juvénal Habyarimanatook charge after a relatively bloodless military coup.At first, the new regime was popular, and Habyari-mana achieved a degree of social peace. While Tutsiremained marginalized—with virtually no represen-tation in government or the military—the popularand official violence against them largely stopped.

At the same time, however, Habyarimana madeit clear that he intended to rule Rwanda in the fash-ion of the old monarchy. In 1974, he organized theNational Revolutionary Movement for Development(MNRD) and banned all political parties from thecountry. Indeed, he tried to ban politics altogether,declaring the MNRD to be a social movement. Thenew president also imposed a rigid and repressive bu-reaucratic structure that required people to registerbefore moving or traveling. It was also socially con-servative, arresting hundreds of Tutsi girlfriends andmistresses of European residents.

The country did progress economically, however,joining both French-speaking and English-speakingorganizations in Africa. By the late 1980s it had wonhundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid. To out-siders, then, Rwanda appeared to be a peaceful, well-ordered, and increasingly prosperous African country.But beneath the surface, things were not so peaceful.Security forces ruthlessly crushed any sign of opposi-tion to the regime. Nor was the economic growth se-cure. While the vast majority of Rwandan peasantsgot by on subsistence farming, the commercial eliteslived off earnings generated from the country’s twomain exports, coffee and tin, both of which saw adownward spiral in world prices during the 1980s.Indeed, as the prices declined, political instability in-creased. In 1980 there was a failed coup.

In 1988, Colonel Stanislas Muyuya, a potentialsuccessor to Habyarimana, was murdered. This eventreflected deep divisions within the Hutu elite. Likethe Rwandan royal courts of old, various clans, repre-senting various regions of the country, maneuveredfor access to the ruler. The murder of Muyuya set offserious infighting in the capital just at a time whenfalling commodity prices necessitated a 40 percentcut in social spending. Already overburdened by taxesand forced labor recruitment for government proj-ects, the peasantry grew increasingly unruly, espe-cially as overcrowding led to demands for land reform(which would ruin some commercial elites). Whendomestic and foreign journalists reported on thegrowing tensions, they were arrested or thrown out ofthe country.

R P F Invasion and FrenchIntervention

The Tutsi exiles in Uganda were only too aware thatunrest was growing in their country. Militants in theRPF decided that the situation represented a great op-portunity to seize power, or a share of power, in Kigali.Conscious of these developments, the Habyarimanaregime decided to try to repatriate some Tutsi peace-fully. The RPF saw this move as a threat to its plans,and on October 1, 1990, some 2,500 guerrillas of theRwandese Patriotic Army—the military branch of theRPF—crossed the Ugandan border into Rwanda. Af-ter some initial successes, the well-equipped guerrillaoperation bogged down, immeasurably set back by theaccidental death of its commander, Major General FredRwigyema.


Within a week, both the French—who had be-come increasingly involved in Rwanda’s politics andeconomy—and the Belgians sent in troops. But theirsmall numbers and their official noncombat statusleft much to be desired as far as the Rwandan govern-ment was concerned. To win more support, Habyari-mana staged a fake attack on the capital. The ruseworked, and the French sent in more troops. Thescheme played on French fears—they had always in-sisted on tight political and economic control of thecolonies they managed. They were especially eager tomaintain some control in Africa, the one region inthe world where they continued to dominate. Theysaw their main challengers as the British and Ameri-cans. The Tutsi of the invading RPF spoke English,and to the French this represented the threat that En-glish speakers might one day dominate in Rwanda,where French had long ruled as the official language.While France sent in more troops to defend this post-colonial colony, Belgium sent more troops for a morepractical reason—to protect the substantial commu-nity of Belgian expatriates in the country.

Habyarimana used the staged attack on Kigalinot only to gain French support, but also to justifyfurther action against the Tutsi. The regime arrestedhundreds of Tutsi political activists. At the sametime, it vastly expanded its army, which succeeded indriving the RPF out of the country and back intoUganda by the end of 1990. By mid-1992, the Rwan-dan army had increased from a relatively well-disciplined and well-trained force of about 5,000 tosome 50,000. The French, Egyptians, and SouthAfricans supplied arms. The force represented an im-portant deterrent to invasion, but it proved danger-ous and undisciplined. If payment to the troops waslate, they often looted and pillaged both Hutu andTutsi property.

For the next several years, the RPF regrouped itsforces in Uganda under its new commander, MajorGeneral Paul Kagame. It recruited émigré soldiersfrom Uganda and other countries. The relatively highlevel of education among these recruits meant thatthe larger RPF—numbering some 25,000 by 1994—was better disciplined and better trained. Fundingwas provided by the international community ofTutsi expatriates from Rwanda, many of whom haddone well financially. Though reorganizing itself, theRPF also continued its raids, including a successfulone on a Rwandan prison that freed a number of Tutsimilitants.

Attempts at Democracy and Peace

Despite its efforts to round up Tutsi militants, theHabyarimana regime sought to ease tensions by movesto liberalize. In November 1991, the president an-nounced several reforms. For Hutu opponents, he of-fered multiparty elections and a new constitution.For the Tutsi, he promised an end to ethnic referenceson identity cards and all other official papers.

In the wake of this speech, many political organ-izations were formed. The largest and most impor-tant was a new incarnation of the PARMEHUTU,which had been banned after the 1973 coup. Othersincluded a radical Hutu nationalist party, Coalitionfor the Defense of the Republic (CDR), the more lib-eral Social Democratic Party, the Liberal Party, andthe church-based Christian Democratic Party. Mean-while, the president’s own National RevolutionaryMovement for Development (MRND) added a sec-ond “D” to its name standing for “and Democracy.”

The new political parties quickly realized thatthey were meant to adorn Rwanda, not rule it. Thatis to say, their existence allowed the Habyarimanaregime to show the world it was democratic with-out actually surrendering any power. A joint state-ment by the opposition parties complained thatHabyarimana’s MRNDD party had a monopoly onthe government-owned media and often used goonsto break up opposition rallies.

Unfortunately, the violence was not confined topolitical hooliganism. As the country moved hesi-tantly toward democracy, it remained in a high stateof tension. Although it had just turned back an inva-sion by the RPF, it still faced a crisis atmosphere asfighting between the army and the guerrillas contin-ued along the border. Hard-line elements within theruling MRNDD used this climate to organize Hutuvoters to combat Tutsi infiltration. Spreading rumorsof Tutsi massacres of Hutu at political rallies, they setoff a number of massacres of the Tutsi. Fearful of thehard-liners’ growing political power and popularity,the government failed to prosecute those who wereinciting violence.

Still, opposition to the regime grew. After a massrally of some 50,000 people in the capital, Habyari-mana agreed to a multiparty cabinet in January 1992.As the new cabinet worked to lower ethnic tensionsand open up the government, the MRNDD hard-liners were sending a different message, charging the


Habyarimana administration with weakness in theface of Tutsi threats and labeling the opposition par-ties as “fifth columns” for the RPF.

Habyarimana was desperately seeking a way toresolve the growing political tensions and low-levelcivil conflict in the country. The strife was bankrupt-ing his regime, undermining the country’s economy,and potentially creating a revolutionary situation.Spiraling foreign debt forced the government to en-act International Monetary Fund reforms that re-quired the firing of thousands of civil servants andmajor cuts in food and fuel subsidies needed by theaverage Rwandan peasant and worker. By this time,most of the operating budget for Rwanda was com-ing directly from foreign aid.

On August 17, 1992, the president announcedon national radio that he had signed a cease-fireagreement with the RPF in Arusha, Tanzania. But asthe negotiations for a repatriation of Tutsi continuedin Arusha, the Hutu militants in the MRNDD andthe CDR complained that the government was sell-ing the country out to the Tutsi. More insidiously,they were beginning to organize a number of alterna-tive institutions—including Hutu militias, knowntraditionally as the interhamwe, and death squadsrecruited from the army—designed to scare the op-position parties into submission, end the Arusha ne-gotiations, and force the president to launch anall-out war with the RPF.

The militants were also increasing their politicalorganizing throughout the country. At rallies andover their own radio stations, they charged the gov-ernment with selling out the country. Using the oldmyths of Tutsi dominance perpetuated by the Bel-gians, militants warned their fellow Hutu that theTutsi had infiltrated the government and were usingthe Arusha negotiations to reestablish their domi-nance over the Hutu population. They describedTutsi massacres of Hutu in RPF-controlled territoryand a regime that turned Hutu into slaves. In January1993, they organized violent demonstrations in thenorthwest part of the country. The MRNDD andCDR militants massacred some 300 Tutsi civiliansover a period of about a week.

The RPF retaliated in February, invading the re-gion and driving some 300,000 Hutu refugees beforethem. The RPF targeted those they believed had or-ganized the earlier atrocities but killed numerousinnocent civilians and government workers in theprocess. The attack alienated Hutu liberals in the

capital and sparked a harsh response from Paris, lead-ing to the dispatch of 300 more troops to Rwanda.The presence of the French troops dissuaded the RPFfrom marching on the capital.

Despite the setback, negotiations in Arusha con-tinued. While a plan for repatriating refugees wasworked out, the thornier question of how many Tutsito integrate into the national army remained un-solved. Though Habyarimana faced increasing oppo-sition from both Hutu militants and liberals at homeand increasing demands from RPF negotiators, thepresident signed the Arusha Accord in August 1993,paving the way for Tutsi repatriation, a new coalitiongovernment, and an integrated national army. It was acomplicated agreement, with many parts, and wouldrequire goodwill on the part of all parties, a commod-ity in short supply in Rwanda. Aside from the manydifficulties of integrating the Tutsi back into Rwan-dan life and society, the accord also called for thepresence of a multinational peacekeeping force. InSeptember, the United Nations agreed to establish itsAssistance Mission to Rwanda (UNAMIR) with acomplement of 2,500 well-armed troops.

While Rwanda waited for their arrival, tensionsmounted. Preparing for a new political order, thehard-liners—now supported by a new organization,Hutu Power—began to organize for a showdownwith the new coalition government, settling personalscores with opponents and setting up a clandestinenetwork of militias and political groups. Hutu Poweras a movement claimed that the Tutsi were an alienrace to Rwanda and, based on their outsider status,ought to be eliminated. Amid this political turmoilcame a shock from the outside: the assassination ofneighboring Burundi’s first democratically electedHutu president by Tutsi militants in October 1993.With its army still in Tutsi hands, Burundi descendedinto anarchy and mass killings, as soldiers massacredcivilians, and Hutu militias and civilians murderedTutsi. Over the next several weeks, some 50,000 Bu-rundians were killed, about 60 percent Tutsi and 40percent Hutu. Equally significant, the massacressent some 300,000 Burundian Hutu refugees intoRwanda.

The assassination and the arrival of traumatizedHutu civilians fed the propaganda of the militantRwandan Hutu and hardened their conviction thatthe Arusha Accord meant disaster for themselves andtheir country. It also put fear into the more liberalHutu opposition. Burned once by the RPF invasion


in February, they now saw yet another danger ofcoalition-building with Tutsi, a fear enhanced by theRPF’s lack of enthusiasm in condemning the assassi-nation conducted by fellow Tutsi in Burundi.

In the midst of this growing tension, the variouscomponents of the Arusha Accord were being putinto place. In November, UNAMIR peacekeepersbegan to replace French paratroopers. The follow-ing month, several RPF leaders flew to Kigali totake up their positions in the new cabinet. Mean-while, demonstrations and murders rocked the capi-tal, as militant Hutu assassinated liberal politicians,and liberal parties retaliated with attacks on theCDR. The violence prevented Habyarimana from im-plementing the Arusha Accord, and so he flew backto the Tanzanian city in early April to explain hisdifficulties to the impatient heads of states of neigh-boring African states. After a series of lectures,Habyarimana—along with the new Burundian presi-dent, Cyprien Ntaryamira—boarded his jet to returnto Kigali, where he planned to lend it to Ntaryamira

to fly back to the Burundian capital. Flying into Ki-gali airport, however, the plane was struck by twomissiles and crashed, killing everyone aboard.

Genocide and War

While controversy surrounds the assassination, mostRwanda observers now agree, despite the lack of anofficial investigation, that the missiles were launchedby Hutu militants who had two reasons for doing so.One was obvious: to eliminate the moderate Habyari-mana and destroy the Arusha peace process. The otherwas to launch the genocide. Indeed, within minutesof the attack, Hutu-controlled radio, in particularRadio Télévision Libre de Mille Collines (RTLM), wasbroadcasting inflammatory reports about a Tutsi-inspired assassination of Habyarimana. Moreover, theHutu militia and extremist elements in the army im-mediately began rounding up all potential oppo-nents, including both Tutsi and liberal Hutu. Militiaroadblocks went up around the city.


A Rwandan soldier inspects the wreckage of the plane, shot down in an April 1994 missile attack, in which PresidentJuvenal Habyarimana was killed. The incident sparked an outbreak of genocide that took the lives of up to 1 millionTutsi and moderate Hutu. (Scott Peterson/Getty Images News)

To eliminate the foreign presence in the country—which they believed might present an obstacle to theirplans—Hutu militants murdered ten Belgian mem-bers of the UNAMIR force. The strategy worked. Bel-gium, the European country most likely to interveneagainst the militants, immediately pulled out the restof its troops. And UNAMIR, lacking even a mandateto use force to defend itself, pulled back into its com-pound. These actions were taken despite the warningsthe UN had received from UNAMIR’s commander,Roméo Dallaire, three months earlier, that massacreswere occurring, and it looked as if they would spreadand intensify. Meanwhile, across Rwanda, the Hutuunderground went into action, organizing brigades ofcivilians and setting them on their Tutsi neighbors.Radio broadcasts spoke of the duty of all Hutu to de-fend their country by destroying the inyenzi, “cock-roaches”—the term they applied to the Tutsi.

Hutu propaganda broadcasts contradicted them-selves. On the one hand, they sought to dehumanizethe Tutsi by referring to them as insects, making iteasier for Hutu peasants—long used to taking ordersfrom a powerful and all-intrusive bureaucracy—tocommit countless massacres that beggar the imagina-tion. At the same time, the radio broadcasts insistedthat the Tutsi were a dangerous and powerful group,who were secretly organizing to destroy the Hutupeople. Together this potent brew of contempt andfear led thousands of ordinary Hutu into an orgy ofcarnage against their friends, their neighbors, and—given the tradition of Hutu-Tutsi intermarriage—their own kin. Most of the killing was done withsimple tools, like machetes and clubs. Hutu peasants,organized and led by members of the militias and sol-diers from the army, killed an estimated 800,000Tutsi civilians and Hutu sympathizers, about 11 per-cent of the country’s population, between April 6 andearly June 1994.

Another shocking aspect of this genocide was thedeep involvement of the Catholic Church. Rwandawas the most Catholic country in Africa, and manyfled to churches seeking protection, only to find thatpriests were either actively or passively complicit withthe genocide. This disaster was not mindless killingon the part of uneducated peasants alone: physiciansin hospitals also took part, murdering their Tutsipatients in their beds. With the exception of the geno-cide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, this car-nage represented the worst act of genocide since theHolocaust of World War II.

Like the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide oc-curred during a war that the organizers of the geno-cide were losing. Just two days after the assassinationof Habyarimana, the RPF launched a new offensivedeep into the country, with some of its troops arriv-ing in the capital by April 11, where for the nextthree months they battled with elements of the Hutuarmy and militias for control. Not only did the RPFattack the Hutu army; when they encountered UN-AMIR troops at the airport, the RPF attacked them,claiming they could not distinguish UN peacekeep-ers from Hutu troops.

Meanwhile, the outside world failed to act. Theadministration of U.S. President Bill Clinton, stungby the loss of U.S. troops in Somalia a year before,equivocated on the question of genocide, fearing thatany admission that genocide was taking place wouldrequire America’s intervention as a signatory of a 1948international accord on genocide. And while both theUnited Nations and the Organization of African Unity(OAU, now the African Union) recognized the geno-cide for what it was, the former continued to insistthat it was being conducted by both Hutu and Tutsiwhen, in fact, it was an entirely Hutu affair.

Ironically, the Rwandan genocide was financedprimarily with foreign aid, particularly funds fromthe World Bank and International Monetary FundStructural Adjustment programs, though neither in-stitution was aware of what was being done with themoney. It is estimated that $134 million in aid wasspent on genocide preparation in Rwanda—withsome $4.6 million spent on weapons alone. A num-ber of experts believe that such spending allowed thedistribution of one new machete to every three Hutumales. The poverty in Rwanda, whose governmentwas so strongly supported by international aid, is an-other possible cause of the genocide. Scholars suggestthat overpopulation may have been one motivationfor the murder of Tutsi. Indeed, after their deaths,their land and houses were frequently claimed witheagerness by their Hutu neighbors.

The presence of France, the only country to getdeeply involved, made things even worse for the Tutsiof Rwanda. Still seeing their interest in defendingFrench-speaking Africans (the Rwandan army) fromEnglish-speaking invaders (the RPF), the French de-termined to save the Rwandan Hutu by establishing aline that essentially trapped the Tutsi of the RPF andallowed Hutu extremists to continue their massacres.Dallaire, commander of the UN peacekeepers, later


charged that the French troops could have been usedto prevent the genocidal attacks of the Hutu.

Aftermath and Legacy

By mid-June the capital of Kigali had fallen to RPFtroops, who set up an interim government in Julywith a Hutu as president, despite the fact that most ofthe city’s Hutu inhabitants had fled and most of theTutsi were dead. Indeed, under the goading of Hutuextremists and fearful of Tutsi reprisals, some 2 mil-lion Hutu refugees, many of whom had participatedin the genocide, poured across the country’s borders,dropping their weapons as they fled. Most went toZaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) and someto Tanzania. This was the largest sudden mass move-ment of refugees in African history and overwhelmedthe nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such asthe Red Cross, that were trying to provide food andmedical care. There was little water, shelter, or food.Cholera broke out in the camps, killing thousandsmore. The murderers of just a few weeks before nowhid among the refugees, receiving foreign aid andassistance.

Over the next two years, as the new Tutsi-dominated government of Rwanda tried to reestab-lish a semblance of order and redevelopment in thecountry, huge numbers of Hutu refugees remained inthe camps in Tanzania and Zaire, cared for by theUnited Nations and other NGOs. Inside the camps,the Hutu militia organizers took charge. Supportedby the masses of Hutu peasants, the organizers threat-ened violence to protect themselves from being turnedover to Rwandan or international authorities. In ad-dition, they began organizing a rebel movement toinvade Rwanda, take over the government again, andfinish the task of eliminating the Tutsi populationonce and for all.

These Hutu militant plans were dashed whenlong-time Tutsi expatriates began to demand theleaders’ removal from the camps. In Zaire, the Tutsi,together with Zairian rebels, forced the closure of thecamps in late 1996, sending hundreds of thousands ofrefugees back into Rwanda. The Tanzanian govern-ment soon followed suit. Some Hutu refugees es-caped and traveled deeper into Zaire, to the Kivuprovince, pursued by the combined forces of Rwan-dan Tutsi and Zairian revolutionaries. In effect, boththe Hutu and the Tutsi of Rwanda were exportingtheir bitter controversy to another and much larger

country where an oncoming civil war would causeeven more death and destruction.

Like the Holocaust before it, the Rwandan geno-cide, along with the “ethnic cleansing” in the formerYugoslavia, prompted the international communityto create a court system to prosecute those whocommit crimes against humanity. The InternationalCriminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was estab-lished under United Nations auspices at the end of1994, issuing a list of 200 persons considered to beprime movers of the genocide. The list includedmembers of the Akazu, the small circle of Hutu powerelite, and Agathe Hayarimana, the wife of the slainpresident.

In the tribunal’s first years, progress was slow.The first conviction came in 1998 and was followedby former prime minister Kambanda’s admissionof guilt. Beginning in 1999, the court’s pace pickedup. More than twenty-five trials were completed by2005, and the tribunal hopes to complete sixty-fiveto seventy-five cases.

In Rwanda, the government under the RPF’sPaul Kagame faced great difficulties in reconcilingits citizens and rebuilding the country’s society.Since a majority of Hutu Rwandans may have partic-ipated in the genocide, Tutsi and other survivors re-mained fearful. The United Nations andnongovernmental organizations sought to help bydividing citizens into such groups as “returnee,”“victim,” and “survivor.” In 2001, the governmentbegan implementation of a traditional participatoryjustice system, known as “gacaca,” to address theenormous backlog of cases. Democratic local elec-tions were held for the first time in 1999, and, de-spite sweeping political reforms, the countrycontinued its struggle to attract investment and toincrease agricultural production. One striking indi-cator of the long way left to go for true reconciliationis that Rwandan schools no longer teach history,fearing that examination of the country’s painfulpast would only continue to tear society apart.

Ten years after the genocide in Rwanda, theworld was still trying to clarify the lessons of thegrim disaster. Among them were the failure of inter-national organizations and powerful nations to inter-vene during the long months of slaughter; thecomplicity of former colonial governments in currentAfrican problems; and the deep difficulty of mount-ing effective humanitarian interventions in the face oflongstanding feuds between ethnic and cultural ene-


mies. The killing in Rwanda has made world powersand organizations more willing to identify emergingconflicts as “genocide” but still has not led to the de-velopment of effective means of intervention to endor prevent future conflicts.

James Ciment and Erika Quinn

See also: Ethnic and Religious Conflicts; Burundi: EthnicStrife Since 1962; Congo, Democratic Republic of: KabilaUprising, 1996–1997; Congo, Democratic Republic of: In-vasions and Internal Strife, 1998.

BibliographyAfrican Rights Organization. Rwanda, Killing the Evidence:

Murder, Attacks, Arrests, and Intimidation of Survivors andWitnesses. London: African Rights, 1996.

Dallaire, Roméo. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure ofHumanity in Rwanda. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003.

Destexhe, Alain. Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Cen-tury. New York: New York University Press, 1995.

Gourevitch, Philip. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We

Will Be Killed with Our Families. New York: Farrar, Straus,and Giroux, 1998.

Keane, Fergal. Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey. New York:Viking, 1995.

Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism,Nativism, and Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ: Prince-ton University Press, 2001.

McCullum, Hugh. The Angels Have Left Us: The RwandaTragedy and the Churches. Geneva: WCC Publications,1995.

Minear, Larry. Soldiers to the Rescue: Humanitarian Lessons fromRwanda. Paris: Development Centre, Organisation for Eco-nomic Cooperation and Development, 1996.

Peress, Gilles. The Silence. New York: Scalo, 1995.Prunier, Gérard. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. New

York: Columbia University Press, 1995.Scherrer, Christian P. Genocide and Crisis in Central Africa:

Conflict Roots, Mass Violence, and Regional War. Westport,CT: Praeger, 2002.

Vassall-Adams, Guy. Rwanda: An Agenda for International Ac-tion. Oxford: Oxfam Publications, 1994.


Like its Liberian neighbor to the east, Sierra Leonewas founded as a haven for freed slaves and, later, “re-captureds”—slaves freed from ships by the Britishnavy after Parliament declared the international slavetrade illegal in 1807. Unlike the case in Liberia, how-ever, the population of freed slaves in Sierra Leonewas never large enough to form an independentruling class. Thus, coastal Sierra Leone remained acolony of the British government until 1961. A Britishprotectorate over the interior of the country wasestablished in 1896.

In 1951, Britain granted a constitution to thecountry that allowed for free elections. On April 27,1961, Sierra Leone won its independence fromBritain, with Milton Margai of the Sierra Leone Peo-ple’s Party (SLPP) as its first prime minister and withthe opposition All People’s Congress (APC) holdingthe majority of seats in the legislature. Following sev-eral attempted coups and mutinies, a republic wasdeclared in 1971, with APC head Siaka Stevens aspresident. A declining economy in the 1970s led topolitical unrest and a new constitution in 1978

declaring the country a one-party state of the APC.Upon completion of his term in 1985, Stevens wasreplaced as president by the head of the armed forces,Joseph Saidu Momoh.

Unable to reverse the economic decline, Momoh’sgovernment faced a growing wave of strikes and po-litical protests, as well as charges of corruption amonggovernment officials. In response, Momoh declared astate of emergency in November 1987, curtailingnearly all political activity and imposing harsh penal-ties for corruption. Still, protests calling for politicalreform continued to mount in the late 1980s and early1990s, forcing Momoh to accept a new multipartyconstitution in 1991, which was passed by 60 percentof the voters. Rising political unrest led to a militarycoup in April 1992 under the leadership of CaptainValentine Strasser.

Rise of the R U F and LiberianCivi l War

While the Momoh government was collapsing andStrasser was making his plans for a coup d’état inthe capital of Freetown, trouble was brewing in theprovinces. Foday Sankoh, a political radical from thecapital who had been involved in various protests andcoup attempts, had organized a mysterious guerrillamovement called the Revolutionary United Front(RUF) and was establishing political cells through-out the country. Claiming to follow the precepts ofCambodia’s brutal leader Pol Pot and a mysticalnineteenth-century Sierra Leonean rebel named BaiBureh, the RUF largely confined itself during the1980s to small raids on army outposts and smugglingof gems from Sierra Leone’s small diamond fields.

Civil war in neighboring Liberia provided Sankohthe opportunity to expand his struggle to overthrowthe Momoh government, which he said was corrupt andideologically bankrupt. Liberian rebel leader Charles

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Taylor and his National Patriotic Liberation Front(NPFL) were fighting a West African peacekeepingforce called the Economic Community of West AfricanStates Cease-fire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG),which was headed by Nigeria and included a contin-gent of Sierra Leonean soldiers. In 1990 and 1991,Taylor invaded Sierra Leone, hoping to force the gov-ernment to abandon its support for ECOMOG and

give him a share of its income from diamond smug-gling. In his battle against the government, Taylor of-fered military aid to the RUF.

Together, the Liberian NPFL and Sierra Leone’sRUF launched attacks on Sierra Leonean govern-ment troops. Then in November 1991, ECOMOG andthe Sierra Leone government launched a counterattackagainst the rebels. Meanwhile, ECOMOG was cooper-

KEY DATES

1961 Sierra Leone wins its independence from Britain.

1985 Army head Joseph Saidu Momoh becomes president.

1987 Strikes and political protests lead Momoh to declare a state ofemergency.

1991 Continuing protests force Momah to accept a new multipartyconstitution; Nigerian and Guinean troops help the Sierra Leonegovernment launch a counterattack against the newly formedrebel group, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF).

1992 A military coup, led by Captain Valentine Strasser, topples thegovernment.

1995 RUF leaders refuse to negotiate with the government until all for-eign forces leave the country.

1996 Ahmed Tejan Kabbah wins the presidency in March elections; inNovember, Kabbah and Foday Sankoh, head of the RUF, sign apeace agreement.

1997 Despite the fact that all foreign troops have left the country, theRUF violates the agreement and launches new attacks; Kabbahis overthrown in a military coup in May.

1998–1999 Fighting continues as first the Nigerians and then the RUF launchmajor offensives.

1999 On July 7, representatives from the government and the RUFsign the Lome Accord, ending the conflict and calling for theRUF’s demobilization and incorporation into the political pro-cess; nevertheless, fighting contnues.

2002 After new peace agreements, fighting in Sierra Leone comes toan end.

2003 Sankoh dies of heart failure; Liberian president Charles Taylor,who supported the RUF, is ejected from power and forced toseek exile in Nigeria.

ating with another rebel group in Liberia—the UnitedLiberation Movement (ULIMO)—in its battle againstTaylor’s NPFL. Following failed peace talks betweenthe Sierra Leone government, now headed by Strasser,and various Liberian factions in January 1992, govern-ment forces, aided by Guineans, went on the offensiveagainst the RUF and gradually won the upper hand. InLiberia, ULIMO forces were gaining control of theprovinces bordering Sierra Leone, increasingly isolat-ing the RUF, which was caught between ULIMO andthe forces of the Sierra Leone government.

In desperation, the RUF took two British reliefworkers hostage, claiming that Great Britain wasarming the government. The British, who had cut offrelations with Sierra Leone following the Strassercoup in April 1992, denied the allegations. In Janu-ary 1995, the RUF gained control of two miningcompanies, seizing a number of foreign nationals ashostages. Adding to the chaos was the emergence ofbands of renegade soldiers. Known colloquially as“sobels,” a combination of the words soldier and rebel,the renegades often fought for the army during theday and became rebels at night. Because they fre-quently went unpaid, they tended to engage in ban-ditry, smuggling, rape, and murder.

By February 1995, Sankoh began making peaceovertures to the government. The fighting and gen-eral chaos had displaced some 900,000 Sierra Leoneancivilians—about 300,000 to neighboring Liberia andGuinea and 600,000 to the capital, Freetown. Buthopes for peace collapsed when the RUF demandedthat all foreign troops leave the country before thebeginning of negotiations. Besides forces from neigh-boring Guinea, the Sierra Leone government wasdepending on mercenaries from South Africa andGurkha troops from Nepal to recapture territory andmining companies held by the rebels. By June, thegovernment had reclaimed most of the mining ter-ritory. The RUF released all foreign nationals tothe Red Cross by April, and in October it requestedcivilian mediation; the government refused. In re-sponse, Sankoh ordered all relief agencies to leave theterritory he controlled, amid reports of numerousatrocities against civilians.

Meanwhile, the Strasser government in Freetownwas making hesitant moves toward democracy. Afterdefeating an attempted overthrow in October 1995,Strasser announced legislative elections for February1996. Before they could take place, however, Strasser

was ousted in a bloodless coup led by his chief ofstaff, Maada Bio. The new government allowed theelection to go ahead as scheduled, despite continuingpolitical violence and RUF efforts to disrupt the vot-ing. The Sierra Leone People’s Party won a plurality,and in second-round voting in March, Ahmed TejanKabbah was elected president.

Kabbah moved to end the rebellion by the RUF,demanding that the rebels lay down their arms or facea renewed government offensive. In November 1996,Kabbah and Sankoh signed a peace agreement pro-viding that the RUF would disarm and become a le-gal political party, while the government agreed toremove of all foreign troops from the country and re-place them with foreign observers. By February1997, all foreign troops had indeed left the country,but no sooner had they left than the RUF began vio-lating the agreement.

In March, members of the political wing of theRUF removed Sankoh as leader, accusing him of op-posing the peace agreement and fomenting unrestwithin the RUF. Sankoh was placed under house ar-rest in Nigeria. His remaining supporters sought towin his release by kidnapping the RUF members whohad voted for his ouster and Nigeria’s ambassador toSierra Leone. Neither Nigeria nor the Kabbah govern-ment would negotiate with the RUF kidnappers.

Koroma Coup

In May 1997, President Kabbah was overthrown in yetanother military coup. Claiming they were takingpower in order to move talks with the RUF forward,the new junta, led by Major Johnny Paul Koroma, wascondemned by the international community, whichimmediately slapped heavy sanctions on Sierra Leone.The Nigerian government demanded that Koroma re-linquish power and restore the government of Kabbah.It also sent more troops to its base in Freetown. Sup-ported by two naval gunboats, the Nigerians launchedan attack against the Koroma regime in June but weredriven back by a combined force of the Sierra Leoneanarmy and rebels from the RUF, now formed into a se-curity force known as the People’s Army. Koroma’sgovernment was also facing resistance in the provincesfrom the Kamajors, traditional Sierra Leonean guerril-las who continued to support Kabbah.

Despite being isolated by the international com-munity and besieged by Nigerian troops, the Koroma

Sierra Leone: Civi l Confl ict , 19 9 0–Present 271

government tried to consolidate its power by estab-lishing a twenty-member ruling council and a cabi-net of secretaries. Still, Koroma’s government wasunable to win acceptance by its fellow African states.In August 1997, ECOWAS (Economic Communityof West African States) voted to tighten the sanctionsagainst Sierra Leone, prohibiting shipment of virtu-ally all essential items except food and medicine.Fighting between the Kamajors and Nigeria on oneside and Koroma’s forces and the People’s Army onthe other continued throughout the rest of 1997.

In January 1998, the Nigerians mounted yet an-other offensive, backed by jet fighters and naval craft.This assault finally ousted the Koroma government onFebruary 12, forcing its leaders to flee to Guinea. Amonth later, Kabbah was restored to power at an officialceremony in Freetown. International and African sanc-tions against Sierra Leone were lifted, but Nigeriantroops remained in the country.

In late 1998 and early 1999, the RUF launcheda new offensive in an effort to capture Freetown.ECOWAS forces drove RUF forces from the capitaland halted the offensive, but there had been thousandsof casualties. Sankoh and the RUF leadership wereforced to ask for terms toward a peace settlement.

Ending the Confl ict

Beginning in May 1999, members of Sierra Leone’sgovernment met with the leadership of the RUF in thecity of Lomé, Togo, to begin peace negotiations withthe support of the international community, includingECOWAS and the United Nations, which establishedthe UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL). On July7, 1999, the Lomé Accord was announced, declaringan end to the nearly decade-old conflict between theSierra Leone government and the RUF and providing aframework within which peace could be restored.

A cease-fire would be monitored by ECOWAS andUNAMSIL, together with representatives of the gov-ernment and the RUF. Once again, the RUF was todisarm and transform itself into a political party, al-lowing its members to hold office and help govern thecountry. The accord further provided for the establish-ment of a “commission for the consolidation of peace,”or CCP, whose duty would be to oversee the peace pro-cess and verify that all parties adhered to its provisions.The CCP was to incorporate several different commit-tees and national commissions, including the Com-mittee for Humanitarian Assistance to help the

thousands affected by the war, as well as the Truth andReconciliation Commission to create a record of viola-tions of human rights and humanitarian law and pro-mote reconciliation. A separate commission wasestablished to help manage Sierra Leone’s strategic re-sources, the most important being diamonds and gold.

Finally, the Lomé Accord offered full amnestyand pardon to the RUF combatants, including com-mander Foday Sankoh, even though many had com-mitted horrible atrocities. The accord also providedfor many details in managing the peace. They estab-lished a fixed date for elections and arranged for thewithdrawal of mercenaries and the return of refugeesand prisoners to their homes.

The accord proved difficult to enforce. In theearly months of 2000, RUF forces were alreadyviolating the cease-fire, and they compounded theiroffenses by killing demonstrators who were pro-testing the violations. These actions resulted in therepeal of some of the articles of the Lomé Accord,including the ones offering Sankoh and other RUFmembers amnesty as well as allowing them to holdgovernment positions. Sankoh was arrested, anda number of RUF members were removed fromoffice.

A new cease-fire agreement was signed inNovember 2000 in Abuja, Nigeria. The agreementreaffirmed the Lomé Accord but failed to end theresurging conflict. A second agreement, signed inAbuja in May 2001, proved more successful in up-holding the terms of the original Lomé Accord. Overthe course of the next year, the government of Kab-bah further consolidated its power, helping to restorethe rule of law throughout large parts of Sierra Leone.This development was assisted by the demobilizationand disarming of thousands of former combatants.On January 18, 2002, President Kabbah gave a speechin the town of Lungi, where he made a “declaration ofpeace in Sierra Leone.”

Postwar Sierra Leone

Four months after declaring the civil war to be at anend, Kabbah’s party, the SLPP, won a major victory ingeneral elections. At the same time, the RUF, whichwas again allowed to run its own candidates, failed towin any seats in the new government. Soon after, for-eign troops began disembarking from the country,though the UN mission was extended until the endof 2005.


After the war’s end, Sierra Leone made a numberof efforts to bring closure to the conflict. Perhapsmost important was the establishment of a “specialcourt agreement” between Sierra Leone and the UN,which was to try war criminals who bore the greatestresponsibility for war crimes since 1996. These UN-backed courts provided some closure, but many ofthe main participants of the conflict evaded justice,including RUF commander Sankoh, who died fromheart failure in 2003 while in custody and awaitingtrial. Charles Taylor, whose support helped to estab-lish the RUF as an effective fighting force, resigned aspresident of Liberia in 2003, following pressure fromboth the UN and the United States. Taylor went intoexile in Nigeria, which refused to extradite him fortrial on his role in the civil war. In 2006, Taylor wasmoved from his exile in Nigeria to face a war crimestribunal in Sierra Leone. Several months later, he wasonce again moved to The Hague for trial at the inter-national criminal court.

Analysis

The civil conflict that tore Sierra Leone apart endedin 2002. It is estimated that over 50,000 Sierra

Leoneans died in the conflict, with many tens ofthousands more suffering permanent injuries fromthe war. Millions also were left homeless and forcedto seek refuge in neighboring countries, where theywere not always welcomed. On the positive side, thedisarmament of the country was swift, and rapid as-sistance from the UN, World Bank, and other inter-national organizations allowed Sierra Leone to beginthe long process of rebuilding.

James Ciment and Daniel F. Cuthbertson

See also: Ethnic and Religious Conflicts; Liberia: Civil War,1989–1997; Liberia: Anti-Taylor Uprising, 1998–2003.

BibliographyBerger, Daniel. In the Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White

and Black in West Africa. New York: Farrar, Straus andGiroux, 2003.

Keen, David. Conflict & Collusion in Sierra Leone. New York:Palgrave, 2005.

Kpundeh, Sahr John. Politics and Corruption in Africa: A CaseStudy of Sierra Leone. Lanham, MD: University Press ofAmerica, 1995.

Kup, Alexander Peter. Sierra Leone: A Concise History. NewYork: St. Martin’s Press, 1975.

Richards, Paul. Fighting for the Rain Forest: War, Youth and Re-sources in Sierra Leone. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996.

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274

The Somali civil war, one of the most protracted inAfrica, offers a series of paradoxes for students of con-temporary African history. First, the nation of Soma-lia comprises a largely homogeneous ethnic group,sharing faith, language, and culture, which seemed tomake a bitter civil war less likely. Second, it was oneof the most commercially and technologically back-ward of African states, yet the regime of MohammedSiad Barre from 1969 to 1991 was one of the conti-nent’s most totalitarian systems. Finally, even thoughthe country seemed to have little value to East orWest at the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, it drewthe international community into its intractable dis-putes. Still, the Somali civil war was bloody anddestructive—and one of its chief victims was the So-mali state itself, which was still seeking to become

a viable political entity fifteen years after the fall ofBarre.


The Somalis are a distinct ethnic group of some 7 mil-lion people who have inhabited the Horn of Africa forcenturies. Long connected by trading routes to Arabia,the Somalis converted to Islam soon after Muhammadfounded the religion. Indeed, the Islamic connectionsof the Somali people are represented in both theancient tradition of tracing their ancestry to theProphet Muhammad and their modern membershipin the Arab League. This Islamic heritage was rein-forced by the strong Somali role in the religious warsagainst Christian Ethiopia in the Middle Ages.

For much of their history, the Somalis have beendivided into six major clans, distributed in distinctgeographic zones and identified with particular pas-toral or agricultural practices. While the Somalisnever established statehood, they remained a stronglyunited people and effectively formed a nation. Sincethey were scattered across a huge, inhospitable terri-tory, political unification proved difficult, but stu-dents of history still find it unaccountable that theclosely related Somali peoples fell into such bitter in-ternecine fighting.

Somalia attracted the attention of European impe-rialists in the late nineteenth century because of itsstrategic position, with a long coastline running alongthe Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. The British,who controlled Aden (in present-day Yemen), just tothe north, hoped to prevent the French from gaining afoothold in the region. Thus, the British maneuveredto ensure that southern Somalia fell into the hands ofits ally, Italy. The French succeeded in gaining controlof Djibouti, just to Somalia’s northwest and extendedtheir influence in that region. Britain itself seizedwhat is now northern Somalia. At the same time, theSomalis were under siege from the west, where they

SOMALIA: Civil War Since 1991TYPE OF CONFLICT: Cold War Confrontation; Ethnic and ReligiousPARTICIPANTS: Ethiopia; United Nations; United States

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shared a long and isolated desert border with Ethiopia.Seeking to expand, the Ethiopians gained control ofOgaden, home to many Somalis.

Each of the powers occupying parts of traditionalSomalia—Italy, France, Britain, and Ethiopia—established alliances with Somali clans, beginning thesplintering that would factionalize Somalia after inde-pendence. The region was divided into five differentjurisdictions: one each under the Italian, French, andEthiopian flags, and two under British control. Effortsby Muslim forces to drive the imperialists out in theearly 1900s failed, leaving the Europeans and Ethiopi-ans even more entrenched. In the 1930s, the Italiangovernment of Benito Mussolini used Italian Soma-liland as a base for the successful invasion of Ethiopia,forming a short-lived Italian East African empire. Withthe defeat of Italy by Allied forces in World War II,Italian Somaliland was ceded to the British.

Following the war, Britain proposed a unitedSomaliland under UN trusteeship, but the plan wasrejected and the country remained partitioned amongFrance, Britain, and Ethiopia. The Italians also re-turned to administer part of the region in 1950.During these years, the Somalis, encouraged by theBritish, futilely sought the return of Ethiopian-occupied western Somaliland and the Ogadenregion.

Pan- Somali Nationalism

In 1960, the various colonial regions of Somalia wereunited in the newly independent state of Somalia. Atfirst, the leadership of Somalia struggled to overcomethe colonial legacy of being administered by severaldistinct political, judicial, and linguistic systems.Differences were especially great between clans in the

Somalia: Civi l War Since 19 91 275

KEY DATES

1960 The UN trusteeship of Somalia and British-administered Northern Soma-liland are united to form independent Somalia.

1978 The Ethiopian army crushes pro-Somali rebels in the Ogaden regionof Ethiopia.

1991 Armed resistance from the United Somali Congress (USC) forces long-time dictator Siad Barre to flee the country; in the wake of his ouster,warfare among various clans breaks out across Somalia; members ofthe Isaq clan in northern Somalia declare their independence fromthe rest of Somalia.

1992 Clan fighting and drought lead to famine in large parts of Somalia;in December, 30,000 UN troops, including American soldiers, move intoSomalia to prevent clan attacks on aid workers trying to feed hungrySomalis.

1993 U.S. forces begin to fight various clan leaders that have attacked UNtroops; in July, a U.S. attack on clan leader Mohammed Farrah Aidid’sheadquarters kills seventy-three Somali elders by accident; nineteenU.S. soldiers are killed in another raid in search of Aidid in October.

1994 UN troops pull out of Somalia in March.

1996 Aidid is killed in a skirmish; while many hope this might lead to peace,he is succeeded by his son Hussein Muhammed, who vows to fight on.

2004 Leading Somalis, meeting in Kenya, form the Transitional Federal Gov-ernment in hopes of bringing an end to clan fighting in Somalia.


north and south. In 1961, officers from a northernfaction of the army rose up in an unsuccessful coupagainst the government, which was dominated bysoutherners.

Still, the common linguistic and ethnic bonds ofthe Somali people eventually led to an uneasy inte-gration of the northern and southern administra-tions. What prevented a more effective administrationwas clan loyalty. With regional administrations con-trolled by different clan networks, personality andpersonal connections tended to matter more thancompetence in the appointment of government em-ployees. To solve the problem of clan identification,the government instituted a neat but largely superfi-cial solution: All references to clan identity had to beprefaced with an “ex-,” thereby consigning clans tohistory by a manipulation of language.

The only topic on which most Somalis agreedwas unification of the Somali homeland. They espe-cially wanted the territories just outside their bordersthat were occupied by Somali-speaking peoples. Theseincluded northern Kenya (controlled by Britain), Dji-bouti (controlled by France), and western Somaliaand Ogaden (controlled by Ethiopia). The first targetwas northern Kenya. When Britain refused to ac-knowledge the wishes of the Somali majority thereand handed the territory over to newly independentKenya in 1963, a low-intensity guerrilla war—knownby Kenyan authorities as the shifta, or “bandit war”—broke out, lasting some four years. Though it dis-rupted the region, it never seriously threatened Kenyansovereignty.

Meanwhile, a more serious Somali uprising hadbroken out in Ogaden. Somalia appealed to Westernpowers for help in its fight against Ethiopia but wasturned down. It then approached the Soviet Unionand succeeded in gaining sympathy and limited as-sistance. This relationship between Mogadishu andMoscow would bear fruit in later years.

After seven years of low-intensity conflict withKenya and Ethiopia, a new Somali government underMuhammed Egal took office in 1969. It sought toease relations with its neighbors, cutting off aid tothe rebels and attempting to unify the Somali nationby diplomatic means. But Egal’s softer approach in-flamed Somali nationalists, as did his manipulation ofSomalia’s last nominally free national elections andhis increasingly autocratic rule. On October 15,1969, the president was assassinated. A week laterthe Somali military took over in a bloodless coup.

Somali Revolution

The officers who revolted were sick of the corruption,nepotism, and incompetence of the earlier regimes.But the new government soon went a step furtherthan the mere administrative reforms initially envi-sioned by the officers. Under the increasingly tightcontrol of coup leader and army commander Mo-hammed Siad Barre—now head of state and presidentof the Supreme Revolutionary Council (SRC)—Somali society was turned upside down. Amongother changes, Barre established the death penalty forserious crimes rather than the traditional tribal bloodpayment, hoping to break down clan loyalties andforge a more united national identity.

In 1970, on the first anniversary of the coup, SiadBarre announced more far-reaching measures under aprogram he called “scientific socialism,” patterned af-ter similar models in the Eastern bloc. With the armygrowing ever more dependent on Russian aid and ad-visors, the government instituted national propa-ganda campaigns against tribalism and corruption.The word jaalle, or “comrade,” was substituted forthe complex set of forms of address in traditional So-mali usage. Street children and orphans were gath-ered into Revolutionary Youth Centers, and vigilantesquads were set up in every village and neighborhoodto defend the principles of the revolution.

Increasingly, the state grew more totalitarian. Anational cult resembling those in Stalinist Russia orlatter-day North Korea was propagated by the Min-istry of Information and National Guidance aroundthe figure of Siad Barre, who was often portrayed inmurals and billboards alongside Lenin. The newform of address for Siad Barre became “Father of theNation.” The office of the presidency was extendedto include virtually all government agencies and in-dependent organizations. A National Security Serviceand National Security Courts dealt with political op-ponents. The country was divided into fifteen new re-gions that had nothing to do with the old clanboundaries, while the old clan leaders were retitled“peacemakers” and woven, at least theoretically, intothe state bureaucracy.

The effort to destroy old political loyalties andinstill a new nationalism was matched by economicand cultural reforms. The Siad Barre government na-tionalized what little industry the country had andmade farmers and herdsmen sell their commodities togovernment purchasing boards. (This was difficult to

enforce among the pastoralists, since they could sim-ply herd their animals to market in neighboringcountries.) In its efforts to settle northern nomads, inorder to increase productivity and establish more ef-fective political control, the government was aidedby a drought that forced many herdsmen to settle ingovernment camps in the south of the country, wherethey were taught to fish and farm.

Renewed Pan- SomaliNationalism

Siad Barre focused on domestic issues of economic re-form and political control during his first five years inpower. In 1974 events outside the country forced himto focus his attention on foreign affairs. During thatyear, the longstanding monarchy of Haile Selassie inEthiopia fell to a military coup of left-wing officers.In the confusion that followed, the Eritrean people ofnorthern Ethiopia rose up in revolt to achieve an in-dependent homeland. Somali nationalists in easternEthiopia rose up, hoping to unite with their brethrenin Somalia. By 1976, the Western Somali LiberationFront had driven the demoralized Ethiopian army outof much of Ogaden.

The new socialist government of Colonel MengistuHaile Mariam in Ethiopia sought military helpfrom the Soviet Union to battle its restive minoritypopulations. The United States had cut off assis-tance to Ethiopia as it became increasingly socialist.Within a year, a major change had occurred in theHorn of Africa. The Soviets abandoned Somalia, whichit had been aiding, and took the side of Ethiopia.The United States moved tentatively to fill the aidgap in Somalia and retain some influence in theregion.

With Russian aid, Ethiopia crushed the Ogadenrebellion in 1978. Nearly a million Somali refugeescrossed the border into Somalia. Half were housed ingovernment-run camps, while the other half were ab-sorbed by their Somalian families and clans. By 1980,approximately one out of every four Somalis was arefugee.

Somalia’s defeat in Ogaden also produced unrestin its military, leading to a coup attempt in April1978 by military officers from the Dayod clan, a tra-ditional rival of Siad Barre’s Marrehan clan. The coupfailed, but its leaders formed an antigovernmentguerrilla force called the Somali Salvation Demo-cratic Front (SSDF) across the border in Ethiopia.

With Ethiopian aid, they made some progress againstthe Siad Barre government.

Even though Russian aid to Ethiopia had helpedcause a massive refugee problem for Somalia, theRussians’ departure from Somalia in 1978 was wel-comed by the Somali people, who realized that Sovietadvisers contributed to the more repressive aspects ofthe Siad Barre regime. After the Soviet departure,Siad Barre announced a return to democracy and thefreeing of some 3,000 political prisoners. Much ofthis declaration, however, was merely rhetoric. Inelections held in 1979, Siad Barre manipulated thesystem to ensure the overwhelming victory of thegovernment party.

With the loss of Russian support, Siad Barre feltvulnerable to his enemies at home. To strengthen hishold on power, he developed closer ties with particu-lar clan leaders. He moved to appoint members ofthree specific clans—his own (Marrehan) and those ofhis mother (Ogaden) and son-in-law (Dulbahante)—to all key government posts. The ruling party increas-ingly became associated with these clans. Throughthe party network of security officials and spies, thesethree clans began to impose their will over all otherclans throughout the country.

Famine and Civi l War

The 1980s were a terrible time for the Horn of Africa.A prolonged drought led to large-scale refugee move-ments and the need for massive international food aid.The suffering, as well as the increasingly militaristicrule of the Siad Barre regime, led to yet another guer-rilla uprising in Somalia in the early and mid-1980s.The Isaq clan of the north formed the Somali NationalMovement (SNM) to express its deep resentmentagainst the domination of southerners in the nationalgovernment. To crush the movement, the governmentemployed political repression and harsh economicmeasures, including withholding food aid to thenorthern region. Despite these measures, armed oppo-sition to the Siad Barre regime was growing.

In April 1988, Siad Barre and Ethiopia’s Mengistufinally signed a peace treaty in which they agreed tostop supporting rebel movements in each other’s terri-tory. Siad Barre stopped supporting Somalis attempt-ing to liberate western Somalia from Ethiopia, andMengistu ended his help to Siad Barre’s Somali ene-mies in the north. This loss of support goaded theSNM to launch a bold attack on military installations


throughout northern Somalia, leading to an all-outcivil war between the regime and the Isaq clan thatwould last until 1991.

In southern Ethiopia, Ogaden Somalis who hadlost their support from the Somali government gaveup their fight against Ethiopia and crossed the borderback into Somalia. There, many were recruited toserve in militias in northern Somalia, while otherssettled in lands and towns abandoned by the Isaq,taking over their property. Siad Barre struck back byrecruiting other northern clans to fight the SNM,calling on their sense of clan solidarity. Thus theslowly collapsing Siad Barre regime used old divi-sions and animosities to keep itself in power.

Siad Barre continued to court the Ogaden refugeepopulation, but the increasing barbarity of his pacifi-cation efforts alienated this key group. Many ac-cepted a deal from Ethiopia’s Mengistu that allowedthem to return to new autonomous areas within theOgaden. Angry at their second-class treatment bySomali officers, the Ogaden Somalis formed yet an-other rebel group, the Somali Patriotic Movement.


This group then joined other opposition groups in aloose confederation called the United Somali Con-gress (USC).

The USC was dominated by the Hawiye branchof the Somali family of peoples. One Hawiye clanlived in and around the Somali capital, Mogadishu.Another, from the north, was led by Mohammed Far-rah Aidid, a former general and diplomat in SiadBarre’s government. Desperate to end the multipleuprisings, Siad Barre called upon his Dayod clan tomassacre the Hawiye opposition in Mogadishu. Thiswarlike act sparked a new round of bitter interclanfighting and brought the northern forces of Aidid toMogadishu. On January 26, 1991, Siad Barre wasforced to flee Mogadishu, taking refuge in his clan’shome base in Gedo, northwest of the capital. He tookwith him the last semblance of a central governmentfor Somalia.

In Gedo, Siad Barre formed the Somali NationalFront (SNF), based on his own clan and its allies, toreturn himself to power. His recruiters told storiesof the Hawiye’s indiscriminate revenge killings of

A clan fighter loyal to the joint forces of the United Somali Congress and Somali Patriotic Movement displays a truck-borne missile system amid fighting in the southern part of the country in May 1992. (Alexander Joe/AFP/Getty Images)

Dayod clansmen, but it was too late to be effective. InApril, the rebel USC defeated Siad Barre’s followers,driving tens of thousands of new refugees into Kenyaand Ethiopia.

With Siad Barre gone, the Abgal group, under aprominent Mogadishu trader named Ali Mahdi, es-tablished an interim government. But this movecreated suspicions among Aidid’s group, sparking re-newed fighting in the capital between the two groupsfor six months. Finally, a USC party congress in Julyelected Aidid chairman and permitted Mahdi to stayon as interim president. Tensions persisted neverthe-less and, by September, had flared up into heavystreet fighting, leaving the capital divided betweenthe Abgal and Aidid-run clans.

Even during the fighting, the Abgal governmentwas sending emissaries to powerful countries abroad,attempting to win recognition and support. In addi-tion, Abgal leaders began talks with the northernIsaq clan and its organization. Misunderstanding andjealousies between regions and clans continued todisrupt the talks, however, and the Isaq organizationremained cool to the idea of joining the interimgovernment.

Instead of joining an alliance with southerners,the Isaqs were successfully allying themselves withother clans in the northwest, an alliance based ontheir mutual distrust and hatred of southerners andthe memories of the atrocities that Siad Barre had com-mitted against the peoples of the northwest. At a con-ference in May 1991, the Isaqs and others in the areadeclared their region—formerly British Somaliland—independent of the south. Somalia was breaking apartalong the old imperialist boundaries that Britain andItaly had set a hundred years earlier. It had two in-terim governments that refused to recognize eachother, both of which were actively seeking interna-tional recognition. Neither group would gain thatrecognition. Mahdi’s “government” represented onlythe capital of Mogadishu (and sometimes only a fewkey neighborhoods of that city). By contrast, theIsaqs’ SNM controlled much of the country, at leaston paper, but they did not have access to the re-maining shreds of government administration inthe capital.

Throughout 1992, then, the country remaineddivided along clan lines, based on divisions that hadbeen deepened by Siad Barre’s covert use of clan loy-alties to reinforce his power. As they gained access toimproved weapons, the clans sought first for revenge

against enemy clans. Increasingly fearful and en-raged, they launched invasions of other clans’ territo-ries and organized to defend their own territoriesagainst attack. The year was marked by some of themost vicious fighting in the war. Mogadishu wasbeing destroyed in the sustained street fighting be-tween the various factions. The commercial and in-dustrial sectors of the economy were in ruins, andeven agriculture was being affected. The standard ofliving for ordinary Somalis, already at a low ebb, be-gan to spiral downward again. Hunger and starvationwere spreading throughout the south. Moreover, thefighting had driven the United Nations and virtuallyall international aid agencies out of the country, com-pounding the suffering. And when the effort wasmade to bring in supplies through the Mogadishuairport, the goods were looted by various factions,sparking resentment outside the city and a belief thatthe international community supported the Hawiye.

International Intervention—and Withdrawal

With the intense suffering of Somali civilians gainingincreasing attention in the world’s media, the inter-national community began to respond. After failedUN mediation, U.S. President George H.W. Bush,recently defeated for reelection, decided to send U.S.troops to Somalia in December under the operationalname “Restore Hope.” The 30,000-man force—known officially as the Unified Task Force (UNITAF),then the United Nations Operation in Somalia (UN-OSOM), and drawn from first-world (largely theUnited States), Islamic, and African countries—wasgiven the mission of securing peace, mediating be-tween the clans, and ensuring the safe and effectivedelivery of food aid to the civilian population of thecountry.

At first, UNOSOM seemed effective in coolingthe fighting near Mogadishu and ensuring food deliv-eries, but it soon got caught up in the clan struggles.In attempting to mediate disputes, it accepted war-lords and their representatives as serious negotiators.Many of these leaders proved to be more interested inusing the talks to improve the position of their clanand blaming violence on others than in bringing anend to the conflict. UNOSOM commanders began tointerpret the hostilities as direct attacks on them.Then Aidid’s forces did attack UNOSOM troops andkilled twenty-three Pakistani soldiers to prevent


delivery of arms and food to their opponents in thecity. UNOSOM immediately set out to capture Ai-did. In July, a U.S. helicopter raid on a building sus-pected of being Aidid’s Mogadishu headquartersaccidentally killed seventy-three Somali elders hold-ing a peace conference, increasing the animositiesbetween UNOSOM and Aidid’s forces.

The United States and UNOSOM received warn-ings from Somalis and international experts to call offtheir search for Aidid and end the spiraling violence.Yet, they persisted in their efforts. On October 3,UNOSOM forces engaged in an all-night battle withAidid’s men, leading to the death of nineteen UNO-SOM soldiers. When television news showed Somaliforces dragging the body of a dead U.S. Marinethrough the streets of Mogadishu, public support inthe United States for the mission to Somalia ended.American and European countries soon announcedthat they would withdraw in March 1994. U.S. mili-tary leaders felt humiliated by the incident and bitterthat the Somalis seemed unable to negotiate in goodfaith. The United Nations was forced to revise itsmandate in Somalia. Disgusted by the continuingquagmire, the UN also withdrew in March.

The withdrawal seemed to spur Aidid and Mahdito reach an agreement over the crucial question ofaccess to the port and airport in Mogadishu, but thisagreement also was quickly violated by both sides.After a conference of pro-Aidid groups in southernSomalia elected Aidid “president” of yet another in-terim government, conflict quickly reemerged be-tween Aidid and opposition groups. Aidid capturedthe southern port of Baidoa, but renewed fightingbroke out in Mogadishu at the end of 1995 andlasted into the summer. In August 1996, Aidid diedin a skirmish, and many were hopeful that his deathmight lead to an end to the fighting. It did not. Hisson, Hussein Muhammed Aidid, was elected toreplace his father and vowed to continue the armedstruggle. Following a failed October cease-fire, fight-ing continued throughout the country into early1997.

Meanwhile, renewed efforts to find a peaceful solu-tion to the conflict proceeded. In December 1996, theleaders of more than twenty-five Somali factions—withthe notable exception of Aidid’s—met in Ethiopia,where they hammered out a resolution calling for aforty-one-member National Salvation Council (NSF),with nine members from each of the four major clansand a total of five from the smaller ones. Hussein Ai-

did, however, rejected the council, insisting he was therightfully elected president of Somalia.

Still, the NSF tried to find a way to end the fight-ing. When information was obtained pointing to anillicit trade between European Union countries andvarious clans—whereby Somalia’s banana crop wasexchanged for weapons—the NSF won an EU deci-sion to halt the imports of Somali fruit. The NSF alsogained financial aid for a national reconciliation con-ference, which was held early in 1997 in Ethiopia.

While the NSF was seeking international help,Aidid and Mahdi were attempting to resolve the dif-ferences between their groups. In January 1997, thetwo met and agreed to the rules established by theOctober 1996 cease-fire, which included halting thefighting, removing roadblocks, ending inflammatorypropaganda broadcasts, helping the delivery of foodaid, and permitting the free movement of peoplethroughout the capital. Still, Aidid refused to accepta power-sharing agreement reached at the Ethiopiannational reconciliation conference.

It is estimated that tens of thousands of Somalisdied in these years of fighting, while hundreds ofthousands succumbed to the starvation and diseasethe war helped to create. The conflict left the countryshattered, not only politically and economically butalso culturally and socially. In the early 2000s, ap-proximately 2 million Somali refugees were scatteredaround the globe, most of them in the neighboringcountries of Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti. In addi-tion, roughly 50 percent of the population within thecountry were considered by the UN to be internallydisplaced people (IDP), most of them living in andaround the capital, Mogadishu. Although the era ofmajor open battles ended in the mid-1990s, a low-intensity conflict among clans persisted in the capitaland other regions.

Efforts to End the Confl ict

The political efforts to end the conflict continued. In2004 leading Somalis met in Kenya and establishedthe Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG).Colonel Abdullah Yusuf Ahmed was elected interimpresident, although he was opposed by many factions.Many Somalis were skeptical about Yusuf Ahmed’sleadership, seeing him as a potential stalking horse forthe government of neighboring Ethiopia, which haddesigns on Somali territory. The TFG, with its basein the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, hoped to return to


Somalia to become the resident government. Butduring months of waiting, it became detached fromthe everyday life of Somalia. Yusuf Ahmed seemedaware of his government’s unpopularity, as he re-quested that the African Union send troops to protectits move to Jawhar, a city just outside the old capitalof Mogadishu.

Meanwhile, the TGF made it a top priority tounify the clans under a single government. This meantbringing self-governing territories such as Soma-liland, autonomous since 1991, and Puntland, underits own leadership since 1998, into the national polity.(Both regional governments were relatively stable,but neither was recognized internationally.) TGFplans called for unifying the government, disarmingroughly 50,000 clan-based militiamen, establishinga judicial system, and rebuilding the economy withforeign aid.

Establishing a new basis of national leadershipwas essential to the process, experts said. In the longcivil war, the authority of traditional clan elders wasundermined; a new political elite called the shotsand told the clan elders what to do. In addition,there was a need to build a stronger civil society,with an emphasis on creating new educational insti-tutions and allowing small businesses to take thelead in recreating the country’s shattered economy.The Somali Leadership Foundation (FALSAN) wasone of the major actors in this sector. Finally, therewas the matter of the Islamist movement. Organiza-tions and parties such as Al Ittihaad Al Islami, andIslah, rose above clan-based loyalties and demon-strated a far greater sense of social responsibilitythan other parties. They played a major role in estab-lishing civil society in the capital. However, the Is-lamists were denied opportunities to participate inthe peace meetings. To succeed, observers argued,the TGF had to find a way of integrating them intothe political process.

International efforts to resolve the Somalian civilconflict intensified in the early 2000s. The Intergov-

ernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) gath-ered all East African nations in an effort to resolveconflicts in the region. IGAD considered not only theconditions inside Somalia, but also the effects ofthe long struggle on neighboring states. The body’sprimary fields of focus were conflict prevention, infra-structure development, food security, and environ-ment protection.

In June 2006, militias loyal to the religious andpolitical organization Union of Islamic Courts tookcontrol of Mogadishu. This raised international con-cerns that an extremist government, such as the for-mer Taliban in Afghanistan, was seizing power in thecountry, which might foster a haven for Islamistterrorists.

James Ciment and Emin Poljarevic

See also: Ethnic and Religious Conflicts; Ethiopia: War withSomalia, 1977–1978; Ethiopia: Civil War, 1978–1991.

BibliographyAbraham, Knife. Somalia Calling: The Crisis of Statehood and

Quest for Peace. Addis Ababa, EIIPD, 2002.Africa Watch. Somalia: A Government at War with Its Own People:

Testimonies About the Killings and the Conflict in the North.New York: Africa Watch Committee, 1990.

Fox, Mary-Jane. Political Culture in Somalia: Tracing Paths to Peaceand Conflict. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University, 2000.

Ghalib, Jama Mohamed. The Cost of Dictatorship: The SomalianExperience. New York: L. Barber, 1994.

Laitin, David D. Somalia: Nation in Search of a State. Boulder,CO: Westview, 1987.

Lewis, I.M. A Modern History of Somalia: Nation and State in theHorn of Africa. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988.

Lyons, Terrence. Somalia: State Collapse, Multilateral Interven-tion, and Strategies for Political Reconstruction. Washington,DC: Brookings Institution, 1995.

Makinda, Sam. Seeking Peace from Chaos: Humanitarian Inter-vention in Somalia. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1993.

Sahnoun, Mohamed. Somalia: The Missed Opportunities. Wash-ington, DC: Institute of Peace Press, 1994.

Samatar, Ahmed I. Socialist Somalia: Rhetoric and Reality.Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books, 1988.


SOUTH AFRICA: Anti-Apartheid Struggle,1948–1994TYPE OF CONFLICT: Ethnic and Religious; Anticolonialism

282

The African and multiracial struggle against theapartheid, or official racial segregation, system ofSouth Africa represents one of the longest, bitterest,but ultimately most successful liberation movementsof the post–World War II era. Utilizing guerrilla at-tacks, bombings, mass demonstrations, and strikes,the outlawed African National Congress (ANC) andits anti-apartheid allies in the labor and religiousspheres eventually forced the ruling National Partyto legalize black opposition organizations, free anti-apartheid leaders such as Nelson Mandela, dismantleapartheid legislation, and permit full and universalsuffrage in open and free elections. Along the way,the ANC was supported by a growing internationalmovement of sanctions, often inspired by solidaritydemonstrations among people of goodwill through-out the world.

The struggle was not an easy one. The rulingwhite National Party utilized brutal tactics to suppressthe movement. As noted above, these steps included

banning anti-apartheid organizations and the impris-onment of anti-apartheid leaders. But it also involvedmassive repression and violence directed against therank and file of the anti-apartheid movement, aswell as against ordinary blacks in South Africa. TheSouth African government organized and sustainedits own black organizations that engaged in bitterethnic fighting with ANC supporters. In defenseof apartheid, the South African government alsolaunched invasions of and supported rebel armies inneighboring black-ruled states, forcing them to cuttheir ties to the ANC.


One of the cradles of humanity, the area that is nowSouth Africa has been inhabited by humans and theirancestors for more than a million years. In historictimes, the region was settled by a number of ethnicgroups. These include the Xhosa-speaking peoplesaround the western Cape, the Venda- and Tswana-speaking peoples in the central and northern parts ofthe country, and the Zulu speakers in the northeast.

The first Europeans to arrive in the region werethe Dutch, who established provisioning stations forDutch East India Company ships making the longjourney around Africa to the East Indies. Further set-tlements of Dutch, French, German, and British set-tlers added to the population of the Cape colonythrough the eighteenth century, leading to its officialincorporation into the British Empire in 1806 andrising enmity between the British Crown and the de-scendants of the original Dutch settlers, known asBoers or, later, Afrikaners. With the banning of slav-ery in the empire in 1834, the Boers—who spoke adialect of Dutch called Afrikaans—emigrated to theinterior in what they call the “great trek,” attackingthe native Africans and seizing their lands in the

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East London

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process. While Britain annexed Natal province (nowKwaZulu-Natal), they permitted the formation oftwo independent Boer republics—the Orange FreeState (now Free State) and the Transvaal (now Gaut-eng)—but only for a time.

The discovery of diamonds and then gold in theTransvaal, beginning in the 1860s, led to a massiverealignment of South Africa’s political and economiclandscape. Waves of miners from around the worldpoured into the region, leading to the imposition ofwhite rule over the remaining African-controlled ar-eas, but only after a bitter struggle with the Zulu na-tion. The growing wealth and power of the Transvaalinspired imperial ambitions, and the British occu-pied the Boer republics. The Boers rose up in a rebel-lion to preserve their independence, but wereultimately defeated after three years of guerrilla-stylewarfare from 1899 to 1902. In 1910, the Union ofSouth Africa was declared an independent dominionunder the British Crown.

At the same time, the various British-owned min-ing companies in South Africa—increasingly power-ful as they consolidated their control over the richdeposits of gold and diamonds—imported East Indi-ans and recruited black Africans to do the heavy laborin the mines and to build the transportation andmanufacturing infrastructure necessary to the indus-try. Unique in Africa, then, South Africa early on sawthe formation of an urban black proletariat.

Independent South Africa

The Union Constitution of 1910 offered the franchiseto white males only, though the so-called “coloreds,”or mixed-race persons, around the Cape colony wereincluded. The white electorate was divided into twomain groups: the Afrikaners and the English. Themuch more numerous Afrikaners were led by Boergeneral Jan Smuts and Louis Botha. They organized theSouth Africa Party (SAP), though an anti-imperialist,

South Africa: Anti Apartheid Struggle, 19 4 8–19 9 4 283

KEY DATES

1912 The African National Congress (ANC) is founded to fight discriminationagainst native Africans in South Africa.

1948 The Afrikaner-dominated National Party (NP) takes power in electionson a platform of formal separation, or apartheid, of South Africanblacks, whites, Asians, and mixed race, or colored, persons.

1955 Africans, Asians, colored persons, and whites meet to write the Free-dom Charter, calling for a nonracial democracy in South Africa.

1960 Seventy African anti-apartheid protesters are shot down by police inSharpeville; the ANC is banned.

1964 ANC leader Nelson Mandela and other ANC officials are sentenced tolife in prison.

1976 Protesting government efforts to impose the Afrikaner language inAfrican schools, students in Soweto protest in the streets; dozens arekilled by police.

1990 Responding to more than a decade of mass demonstrations and an in-ternational movement to economically isolate South Africa, the NPgovernment legalizes the ANC and releases Mandela and other ANCleaders from prison.

1994 Mandela is elected president, and the ANC wins a majority of seats inparliament in South Africa’s first elections open to citizens of all races.


anti-mining group broke off in 1912 to form theNational Party (NP) under the leadership of J.B.M.Hertzog. At the same time, the disenfranchisedAfrican elites, under the chairmanship of PixleySeme, formed the African Native National Congress,soon renamed the African National Congress (ANC).

The first independent South African legislationto control the African population was the Land Act of1913, denying the right of Africans to purchase landoutside of their native reserves. The intent of the lawwas to force Africans to serve as migrant laborers inthe mines. World War I, which began a year after theact was passed, represented a major watershed inSouth African history for several reasons. First, it ledto South African control of the former Germancolony of Southwest Africa (now Namibia). Second,the war resulted in the formation of the secretBroederbond society of Afrikaner leaders, who estab-lished political cells in virtually every major insti-tution of South African life and eventually pavedthe way for Afrikaner control of the South Africangovernment.

Finally, and most importantly, the war resultedin a new wave of urbanization as Africans poured into work in the mines and industries. The squalid liv-ing conditions in the ghettos of South African citiesled to a huge number of deaths from the influenzapandemic after the war. And the influx renewed fearsof African domination among the white population.In 1923, the government passed its second majorpiece of racial legislation: the Natives (Urban Areas)Act, making it illegal for Africans to live in mosturban areas.

The inflow of African miners also led to a deci-sion by mine owners to replace highly paid whiteworkers with blacks. This move led to a strike bypoor Afrikaner workers, which was suppressed bygovernment troops. The Labour Party, in an alliancewith the NP, won the parliamentary elections of1924. The new majority formulated the so-calledcivilized labor policy, whereby blacks were barredfrom virtually all skilled and semiskilled jobs. In1936, the National Party and the South AfricanParty reunited to form the United Party (UP) andgained a parliamentary majority. It passed anotherLand Act, excluding coloreds from owning land out-side certain areas (but still allowing them to vote).The unification of the two Afrikaner parties also ledits most conservative members to break away andform the “purified” NP, led by the Broederbond.

During World War II, this party would support NaziGermany.

Like World War I, World War II acceleratedSouth African urbanization and industrialization, asthe country was forced to manufacture products nolonger available from Europe and America. Thou-sands of black workers poured into factories, as therestrictions of the “civilized labor” policy were eased.The need for black labor also reinvigorated theAfrican National Congress, which had been hard hitby the Great Depression of the 1930s. Now the ANCdemanded universal suffrage and helped organizeAfrican trade unions. Prime Minister Smuts rejectedits democratic reforms—and used the military tocrush a black mine workers’ strike in 1946—but hisUnited Party accepted the need for some reforms, al-lowing some of the black workers into skilled posi-tions. Smuts’s “liberal” stance and a depressedagricultural sector brought new support to the right-wing, racist National Party, which narrowly won the1948 elections and introduced the system that wouldcome to be known as apartheid.

Apartheid

Apartheid was not merely, as it name suggests, asystem of racial segregation, but a series of lawsintended to guarantee the white minority in SouthAfrica economic dominance, political control, and so-cial supremacy. At first, there was little attempt tojustify the apartheid system. Among the Afrikanerswho dominated the government that imposed it,there was a general belief that Africans and otherraces were simply inferior to whites both biologicallyand culturally, incapable of running their own affairsand in need of white leadership and white-maintainedlaw and order.

As the rest of black Africa won its independencein the 1950s and 1960s, however, a new antiracistconsciousness spread through the industrializedworld. This development forced South African whitesto develop a rationale for their system of racial separa-tion. They argued that the different cultures of SouthAfrica required separation for them to reach theirfullest potential. For example, the government tooksteps to enable Africans to develop along “their ownlines” in the native reserves assigned to them, thoughthis was often interpreted to mean archaic, preindus-trial tribal lines, no longer appropriate for a mod-ern society. The government handpicked chiefs to

govern these areas, giving them extraordinarily broadpowers that undermined traditional forms of Africandemocracy.

From 1948 to 1959, a series of interrelated lawswere passed that restructured South African societyto fit the ideals of apartheid. Among the first of theselaws was the Population Registration Act, which clas-sified all South Africans into various racial groups—white, black, or colored (a class that included EastIndians, other Asians, and people of mixed parent-age). This was the keystone for all subsequentapartheid legislation, which was based on these clas-sifications. Thereafter, the government passed theImmorality Act, banning all sexual relations betweenthe races and forbidding interracial marriage. An-other law designed to separate social interminglingwas the Separate Amenities Act, which sanctionedseparate public and private facilities for the differentraces and specifically stated that these need not be ofequal quality.

Similarly, the government passed the Bantu Edu-cation Act, “Bantu” being a pejorative word, in theSouth African context, for black Africans. Under thislegislation, control over black education was shiftedfrom the Ministry of Education, which had tried topromote somewhat equal educational opportunities,to the Ministry for Native Affairs, which saw its mis-sion as keeping blacks under control.

Equally significant were the laws designed toregulate black movement and labor. Legislation wasenacted that further restricted black access to skilledjobs. Urban segregation was enforced through theGroup Areas Act, which required different races tolive in different districts of metropolitan areas andtowns. Pass laws were instituted that required blacksto present identification showing that they were per-mitted to be in a given white area, usually for workpurposes only. The many violations that this act in-evitably produced provided prison labor that subsi-dized South Africa’s agriculture industry.

At the same time that these restrictive laws werebeing passed, legislation was also being enacted thatcurtailed political activity not just by blacks but byopposition forces of all races, including whites. Underthe Suppression of Communism Act, the powerfulSouth African Communist Party was banned, alongwith many other opposition organizations under theloosely worded law. The act took away the votingrights of people in the colored class in the CapeProvince. This result effectively reduced the power of

the more moderate United Party, which colored vot-ers had long supported.

Resistance and Repression

In response to this repressive legislation, the ANC—allied with the South African Indian Congress(SAIC)—began a campaign of mass civil disobedi-ence, with members purposely violating segregationlaws. At the same time, a coalition of black, colored,and liberal white forces met in 1955 to hammer outthe Freedom Charter, calling for a nonracial SouthAfrica. These moves sparked drastic retaliation by thegovernment, which put most of the opposition lead-ers on trial for treason. Though acquitted after somefive years on trial, their indictments deprived theanti-apartheid movement of its leadership at a criticalmoment in South African history. In 1960, SouthAfrica declared itself a republic and applied for mem-bership in the British Commonwealth, but it was re-jected after strong protests from black African statesthat were already members of the Commonwealth.

During that same year, repression of anti-apartheidactivism turned extremely violent. At a rally in theJohannesburg township of Sharpeville in March, po-lice opened fire on unarmed demonstrators, leavingsixty-seven dead and hundreds wounded. After themassacre, members of the international communitybegan to discuss ostracizing South Africa and impos-ing sanctions. Inside the country, the government re-sponded to the growing unrest by banning the ANCand its more radical sister organization, the PanAfrican Congress (PAC). Under the leadership ofNelson Mandela, the ANC formed a military wing,the Unkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation, or SN),and the PAC founded Poqo. Together, they launcheda campaign of sabotage against white property andgovernment facilities, making a point of avoiding vi-olence against persons. With the help of the U.S.Central Intelligence Agency, the South African gov-ernment was able to capture Mandela and other ANCleaders, who were put on trial and sentenced to lifeimprisonment. Others fled the country to continuethe struggle from abroad.

To counter pressure from the world community,the South African government developed a plan thatit believed would pass muster under internationallaw. In 1963, it began to “decolonize” South Africaby establishing “independent” homelands for Africans.Under this plan, South Africa’s regulations on black


mobility and segregation would fall under the inter-nationally recognized right of all governments to reg-ulate the movement of “foreigners” in their territory.In 1963, Transkei—or Bantustan, as it was oftencalled—became the first such homeland with its owngovernment. Six others followed in the early 1970s:Ciskei, Bophuthatswana, Lebowa, Venda, Gazankulu,Qwaqwa, and KwaZulu. Though containing tradi-tional territories of the various ethnic groups, theBantustans were much smaller than the traditionalterritories, usually including only the poorest agri-cultural land. The South African government alsodeveloped industry around the periphery of thehomelands to make use of low-paid African laborers,who would be required to return to the homelandeach night.

To further enhance the policy of making non-Bantustan South Africa a fully white country, newand stricter controls were placed on blacks living inurban areas. Increasingly, black workers were re-quired to leave their families in the homelands whileworking in the cities. Living in rundown and over-crowded workers’ barracks, they could see their fami-lies only occasionally. The homelands thus began toserve as warehouses for surplus labor.

By the 1970s, the market for migrant labor wasdeclining, as modernization eliminated the need formuch low-skilled labor. The homelands grew increas-ingly impoverished, and more blacks violated thelaws to live in urban areas. Meanwhile, blacks withthe right to live in the urban townships began to de-mand skilled and better-paying jobs, especially sincethere was a shortage of white labor. In 1973, thesevarious pressures resulted in a massive wave of Africanlabor strikes, which paralyzed South African minesand factories. While the government of John Vorsteraccepted some of the black demands, it also grantedfull “independence” to several of the homelands.These states were then turned over to handpickedtribal leaders willing to do Pretoria’s bidding. How-ever, none of these so-called independent nations wasever recognized by a single foreign government.

Another crisis facing the apartheid governmentin the mid-1970s concerned developing conflicts onits borders. In 1975, Portugal abruptly pulled out ofits southern African colonies of Angola and Mozam-bique. Mozambique shared a long border with SouthAfrica, and Angola bordered its illegal colony ofNamibia. Suddenly both were governed by socialistand strongly anti-apartheid regimes. To keep these

governments from supporting the exiled African Na-tional Congress—and to prove that black Africanswere incapable of self-government—the South Africanmilitary launched invasions and supported rebelmovements in both countries to undermine theireconomies and destabilize their governments. Even-tually defeated in Angola in the late 1980s, the SouthAfrican military was forced to withdraw. Faced withan independence movement in Namibia, the SouthAfricans also agreed in 1988 to grant Namibia itsindependence by 1990.

Resistance and RepressionIntensif ies

The Soweto uprising, the largest black racial clash inSouth African history up to that time, began as awalkout by black students in Soweto, a huge impov-erished black township about fifteen miles fromJohannesburg. The students were protesting the re-quirement that they learn the Afrikaans language.Police met the marching children and opened firewithout warning, killing 172 and injuring 439.Within hours, demonstrations spread across the en-tire country, prompting more crackdowns by policeover the next year. Hundreds of demonstrators whohad not been killed or arrested fled South Africa andjoined the liberation organizations in exile. Mostjoined the African National Congress, which becamethe most powerful organization representing SouthAfrica’s black population.

Prime Minister Vorster responded to the wide-spread unrest with a plan to divide the resistancemovement along racial lines. Since no homelandscould be developed for coloreds—since they had notraditional territory in South Africa—the Vorstergovernment proposed the formation of a new parlia-ment with separate houses for coloreds and Asians. Inthe 1977 elections, the arch-conservative NationalParty (NP) won the whites-only election overwhelm-ingly, but was challenged for the first time by a lib-eral opposition party, the Progressive Federal Party.The plan for a legislature with three houses was soonsunk by hard-liners in the NP.

The following year Vorster was eased out of of-fice as a result of a corruption scandal. The newprime minister was P.W. Botha, who began easingsome of the apartheid system’s restrictions. Certainjob restrictions were lifted, and more trade unionactivities were permitted. New laws allowed blacks


to obtain long-term leases on their homes. Blackswith rights to be in urban areas were allowed tomove freely from one town to another, and the lawsagainst interracial sex and marriage were repealed.As had happened earlier, these modest reformssparked a secession by hard-liners in the NationalParty and the formation of the Conservative Party ofSouth Africa (CPSA). With the ultra-conservativesgone from the ruling party, Botha was able to insti-tute the three-house legislature, which went into ef-fect in 1984.

As it turned out, the plan to provide tokenrepresentation for blacks and coloreds backfired. InAugust 1983, various multiracial, anti-apartheid or-ganizations gathered to form the United DemocraticFront (UDF) in opposing the three-house plan. Theypointed out that huge numbers of blacks had beensubtracted from the South African total by makingthem citizens of the so-called independent home-lands. In low-turnout elections in 1984, coloredvoters overwhelmingly voted against the plan. Atthe same time, a new wave of township rebellionsspread across the country in opposition to the plan. Thedemonstrators were supported by the newly formedCongress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU),

representing black trade unionists, which launcheda series of solidarity strikes that paralyzed thecountry.

Township violence escalated again in 1985, fol-lowing yet another police massacre of black protesters,this time memorializing the twenty-fifth anniversaryof the Sharpeville massacre. Twenty blacks were killedwhen police opened fire in Uitenhage, a townshipoutside Port Elizabeth. Protests and demonstrationswere met by police violence across the country, lead-ing to the imposition of a state of emergency in July.The emergency allowed increased police powers, butthe government was losing control of the black town-ships to “comrades,” who killed or terrorized themany police informers and collaborators living intheir midst.

In Natal province, one black group took uparms against the African National Congress. TheZulu-supported Inkatha movement, under ChiefMangosuthu Buthelezi, a minister in the govern-ment of the KwaZulu homeland, led the attack.At first, outsiders saw this as ethnic-based violencebetween the Zulu people and the Xhosa, who sup-ported the ANC. The ANC insisted that the black-versus-black violence was largely instigated by the


In the aftermath of the Soweto uprising of June 1976, major anti-apartheid demonstrations were held in Cape Town(seen here) and throughout South Africa. The police responded with a harsh crackdown, escalating the violence.(AFP/Getty Images)

government. Years later, when police files wereopened during “truth” hearings, the ANC claimswere corroborated.

By 1987, the combination of a massive army pres-ence and a large expenditure of government funds forhousing and social service in the black townships qui-eted the situation. In other parts of the world, how-ever, the actions of the South African governmentcontinued to cause outrage. Under pressure from stu-dent and worker demonstrations in Europe and theUnited States, governments began applying eco-nomic sanctions to South Africa. The conservative ad-ministrations of President Ronald Reagan in theUnited States and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcherin Britain tried to resist sanctions but were graduallypersuaded to go along.

Supporters of sanctions also targeted interna-tional corporations doing business in South Africa.Many companies decided they could not take the badpublicity and began withdrawing from their SouthAfrican operations, often selling them to SouthAfrican interests. Even though South Africa had longprided itself on its self-reliance, the country soon dis-covered that its economy suffered when foreign in-vestment and business with other countries began todry up and a large number of its experienced man-agers began to leave. The South African currency, therand, collapsed.

The country’s growing economic problems had apolarizing effect on politics. The liberal wing of theNational Party, under Prime Minister Botha, was be-ginning to move toward negotiations that might leadto government participation with cooperative blackleaders such as Buthelezi. By this time, however,blacks in South Africa had united behind the AfricanNational Congress and its long-imprisoned leader,Nelson Mandela. Trade unions and black churchleaders such as Bishop Desmond Tutu were solidlybehind the ANC. Equally important in thwartingBotha’s plans was the lurch toward the right among alarge part of the Afrikaner population. The AfrikaanseWeerstandsbeweging—a right-wing paramilitaryorganization launched by Eugene TerreBlanche in1977—was growing in popularity and recruitingheavily among the country’s various security forces.And in the all-white parliamentary elections of 1987,the arch-conservative CPSA became the main opposi-tion party. In such a polarized environment, it seemedthat South Africa might erupt in unimaginableviolence.

Apartheid Abandoned

There were some on both sides who were already atwork trying to prevent a violent outcome. As early as1987, influential members of the Afrikaner elite weresecretly meeting with leaders of the ANC (techni-cally breaking the law). These meetings were beingencouraged quietly by elements in the Botha admin-istration. By 1989, however, Botha had had enoughand announced his resignation from the presidency,citing ill health as the reason. Before leaving office, hemet with Nelson Mandela, the ANC leader, at theRobbins Island prison off the coast of Cape Town.Even though Mandela had been in jail for more thantwenty-five years, Botha acknowledged that bothMandela and the ANC would have a role in negotiat-ing the end of the apartheid regime. In August elec-tions, F.W. de Klerk was elected president, and theNational Party retained a clear but diminished ma-jority in parliament.

The full crisis was reached in 1989. The economywas deteriorating rapidly. International isolation andopprobrium were reaching a fever pitch. Indeed, newadministrations in London and Washington—thoughstill conservative—were joining in the efforts to pres-sure Pretoria. Black protesters and organizations hadmade it clear that no compromise measures such asthe three-house parliament would be acceptable.Africans from the impoverished homelands werepouring into the townships in such numbers that thesecurity forces could no longer contain them.

The ANC also faced problems—including con-tinued opposition from Inkatha and the loss of sup-port from collapsing socialist-bloc governments inEastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Yet it wasclearly recognized by the international community asthe only legitimate negotiating partner, a realizationthat was increasingly dawning on de Klerk and themainstream NP leadership. In September, the Bushadministration announced that if Mandela was notfreed within six months, the U.S. government wouldgo along with strict UN sanctions against SouthAfrica.

Speaking before the three houses of parliamenton February 2, 1990, de Klerk announced that hewas releasing Mandela and ending the legal banon the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid parties, including the South African Com-munist Party (SACP). He also announced that it wasthe government’s intention to open negotiations that


would lead to equality for all South African citizensand universal suffrage. On February 11, in front ofthe international press corps, Mandela walked to free-dom after twenty-seven years in prison. ANC exilesbegan to return to the country.

The joyous moment was shadowed by severallooming problems for the ANC, which was internallydivided between radicals, who demanded a social andeconomic revolution for the country, and conserva-tives, who insisted that the capitalist system in SouthAfrica be retained in the post-apartheid era. More-over, the ANC would have a difficult time imposingdiscipline on the “young comrades” in the townshipswho had come of age in a time of violent oppositionto apartheid and retained a commitment to streetconfrontation. The ANC also faced challenges to itsauthority from Inkatha—still being provided heavycovert support by the government—as well as fromthe black nationalist PAC.

AN C- Government Negotiationsand Renewed Violence

In May 1990, as some of the more egregious segrega-tion restrictions of the apartheid regime were re-versed, the ANC met in negotiations with the deKlerk administration. The ANC agreed to end itsguerrilla operations but refused to accede to the gov-ernment’s plan for a multiparty conference to drawup a new constitution in which each party would rep-resent a race and have an equal voice. The possibilityof a peaceful transition to a post-apartheid era wasfurther threatened by violence between ANC andInkatha supporters that was spreading beyond Natalto other sections of the country.

Although the government faced increasingly vo-cal and violent opposition from hard-line whitegroups, it eliminated the last remaining apartheidlegislation during 1991, including the Group AreasAct and the so-called pass laws restricting blackmovement. The National Party even invited blacksto join it. As the restrictions fell, the internationalcommunity began to lift its sanctions, despite ANCpleas to hold off until free and universal electionswere held. Meanwhile, the ANC had effected a rap-prochement with the PAC at a conference in April.

Still, the violence between the ANC and Inkathacontinued to escalate, despite meetings betweenMandela and Buthelezi. The ANC threatened to walkout of the negotiations unless the government did

more to stop the violence. Suspicions remained amongANC and PAC supporters that certain elementswithin the security forces were still aiding Inkatha.For example, eyewitnesses to a massacre of womenand children in Biopatong, Natal, by Inkatha fightersin June 1992 reported seeing the fighters arrive inpolice vehicles.

After a request by Mandela in July, the UN Se-curity Council sent an investigative commission tolook into the South African security forces’ complic-ity in the ANC-Inkatha violence. Their findingsconfirmed Mandela’s fears and led to the dispatch ofpeacekeepers to South Africa. At the same time, theANC and its allies organized mass actions—includinga two-day general strike—demanding that the gov-ernment negotiate in good faith and end Inkathaviolence. When police in the homeland of Ciskeifired on ANC marchers, killing 28 and wounding200 others, Mandela demanded the dismantling ofhomeland governments and an end to their spuriousindependence.

In November, the ANC and the de Klerk govern-ment announced the formation of an interim govern-ment, headed by a joint commission of ANC and NPmembers. This collaboration angered many in bothorganizations. Outsiders were also alarmed, fearingthat an agreement on a new constitution was immi-nent. The fear was sustained by both Inkatha andwhite conservatives, who believed that the constitu-tional reforms would favor the two main parties. Agroup of officials from Inkatha and the various home-lands organized the Concerned South Africans Groupin April 1993, aimed at pressuring the negotiators toenhance the power of regional governments over thefederal one.

Violence also greeted the impending announce-ment of a constitution, as a series of terrorist bomb-ings against white civilians—allegedly by membersof the Azanian People’s Liberation Army, the newmilitary wing of the PAC—rocked the country.Then, as the forum negotiating the coming electionsannounced April 27, 1994, as the date for the coun-try’s first nonracial poll, 2,000 armed white comman-dos occupied the conference center. The commandossurrendered peacefully after several days, but ANCofficials accused the security forces of laxity, if notcomplicity. Not so peaceful was the continuing con-flict with Inkatha. In August, Inkatha forces near Jo-hannesburg attacked a migrant workers’ hostel, killing100 persons, largely ANC supporters.


In November, the forum offered details of theinterim constitution. New provinces with newnames were included, and the homelands disap-peared as political entities. Plans for the legislativeand executive branches were drawn up with an eyeto the various regions and races of the country. Acentral parliament with 400 members would bedrawn, half from national and half from regionallists of candidates. There would be one presidentand two vice presidents, the latter apportioned toparties obtaining at least 20 percent of the vote.This was done to placate the National Party andits white members. Any party with 5 percent ofthe vote would be entitled to a cabinet member.Meanwhile, it was left up to the assembly to drawup a permanent constitution within two years of itselection.

Both the ANC and the NP had difficulties liningup support among their respective racial communi-ties, though the ANC had the harder time of it.De Klerk was able to persuade right-wing groups togo along with the new constitution by promisingthem a possible future province of their own in amajority-ruled South Africa. Meanwhile, Butheleziand Inkatha, though initially agreeing to register forthe elections as the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP),soon pulled out and threatened a boycott. Theseactions came at a time when fighting between theANC and Inkatha was intensifying. In March, a stateof emergency was declared in Natal, and troopswere sent in, but the violence continued. An alliancebetween Inkatha and white right-wing forces—potentially plunging the country into civil war—nowseemed possible.

The possibility ended, however, after right-wingforces tried but failed to bolster the Bophuthatswanahomeland government, which was besieged by pro-testers. The humiliating retreat of Afrikaner extrem-ists in the face of black resistance fighters deflatedthe right-wing cause, just as the collapse of thehomeland government further isolated Buthelezi.Still, Buthelezi persisted with his threats to boycottthe elections up to the last minute, changing hismind only when he won several concessions concern-ing the sovereignty of the Zulu monarch—largely afigurehead for Inkatha. Buthelezi’s announcement onApril 21 that he would participate in the April 24elections immediately ended much of the violencein Natal and ensured that the election went offsmoothly.

Elections and AN C Government

The elections produced the predicted ANC landslide,though the party fell just short of the two-thirds ma-jority necessary to write the new constitution unilat-erally. The only other party winning at least 20percent of the vote was the NP, which entitled deKlerk to serve as vice president in the next adminis-tration. Inkatha, which took just 10 percent of thevote nationally, won a slight majority in Natal. Thetwo main parties on the far right and black nationalistleft—the Afrikaner Volksfront and the PAC—failedto receive the 5 percent necessary to earn a cabinet po-sition. On May 9, the first truly multiracial nationalassembly in South African history overwhelminglyelected Mandela as the country’s first black president.

The new ANC government faced a host of prob-lems, both foreign and domestic. Recognizing SouthAfrica’s history of interference in the internal affairsof neighboring states, it tried to stay out of conflictsin African countries, though Mandela was called into mediate in various crises, including the Congocrisis of 1997. At home, the government walked afine line, providing much-needed social and eco-nomic improvements in the lives of black SouthAfricans without causing the flight of white citizensand their capital. To assure the international busi-ness community that South Africa remained a safeplace to invest, Mandela appointed whites from thebanking and business community to run the econ-omy. The discrepancies in wealth between the twocommunities—as well as the absence of apartheid-erarestrictions—led to an explosion of crime, thoughmost victims were black.

Political reforms went more smoothly. A draft forthe permanent constitution was completed by June1996, leading the NP to drop out of its coalitionwith the ANC to become an official opposition party,while the Inkatha Freedom Party remained part ofthe ruling coalition. Meanwhile, the aging Mandela—whose steady hand and universally acclaimed in-tegrity did so much to ensure a peaceful transitionto black majority rule—turned over the day-to-dayrunning of the government and leadership of theANC to Thabo Mbeki in 1997.

The new government also walked a fine line be-tween punishing those guilty of apartheid-era crimesand trying to turn over a new leaf in South Africanhistory. In 1995, the national assembly establisheda seventeen-member Truth and Reconciliation Com-


mission, headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Un-der the rules of the commission, victims and perpetra-tors of violence were permitted to testify, the latterreceiving amnesty for full disclosure of their humanrights violations and crimes.

The commission was criticized by many—especially victims of apartheid oppression and the fam-ily members of those killed by police—who saw theperpetrators exonerated. Supporters argued that thecommission was the only practical way to exposethe crimes of the era, since it did not require long, ex-pensive, and potentially divisive court proceedings.

James Ciment

See also: People’s Wars; Ethnic and Religious Conflicts; An-gola: First War with UNITA, 1975–1992; Mozambique: Re-namo War, 1976–1992; Namibia: War of National Liberation,1966–1990; Zimbabwe: Struggle for Majority Rule, 1965–1980.

BibliographyCrankshaw, Owen. Race, Class and the Changing Division of

Labour Under Apartheid. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Gutteridge, William Frank. South Africa: From Apartheid toNational Unity, 1981–1994. Brookfield, VT: Dartmouth,1995.

Juckes, Tim J. Opposition in South Africa: The Leadership of Z.K.Matthews, Nelson Mandela, and Stephen Biko. Westport, CT:Praeger, 1995.

Kanfer, Stefan. The Last Empire: South Africa, Diamonds, andDe Beers from Cecil Rhodes to the Oppenheimers. New York:Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993.

Le May, G.H.L. The Afrikaners: An Historical Interpretation.Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995.

Lester, Alan. From Colonization to Democracy: A New HistoricalGeography of South Africa. New York: Tauris AcademicStudies, 1996.

Marx, Anthony W. Lessons of Struggle: South African InternalOpposition, 1960–1990. New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1992.

Murray, Martin J. South Africa, Time of Agony, Time ofDestiny: The Upsurge of Popular Protest. London: Verso,1987.

———. Revolution Deferred: The Painful Birth of Post-ApartheidSouth Africa. New York: Verso, 1994.

Thompson, Leonard Monteath. A History of South Africa. NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.


SUDAN: Civil Wars in South, 1955–1972;1983–2005TYPE OF CONFLICT: Ethnic and ReligiousPARTICIPANTS: Chad; Eritrea; Ethiopia; Uganda

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Sudan’s civil wars, which have raged intermittentlyfor nearly fifty years, have been the result of the com-plex religious and ethnic subdivisions that existwithin Sudanese society. By the twentieth century,the Sudanese were divided among nineteen majorethnic groups, spoke dozens of different languages,and followed three different religious traditions.

The central divisions within Sudan have been be-tween the Muslim Arab north and the Christian andanimist African south. (Animism is the worship oftraditional local gods and spirits.) The dividing linebetween the two groups was rather arbitrary. WhenArab attackers brought Islam to the region in the

fifteenth century, the process of conquest and conver-sion also involved intermarriage and cultural cross-fertilization. The result was that the “Arabs” of thenorth were of many different ethnic backgrounds,from Semitic to Nilotic, and often looked no differ-ent than the “Africans” of the south. “Arab” was asmuch a cultural and linguistic category as an ethnicone. Many northerners adopted Arabic as their lan-guage and Islam as their religion, and therefore calledthemselves Arabs. (Other northerners were Muslimsbut did not consider themselves Arabs.)

In the south, the African peoples kept the animistreligion of their ancestors. In the nineteenth century,the arrival of Christian missionaries added a third reli-gious tradition to Sudan’s mix. (A form of Christianityhad existed in Sudan many centuries before the Euro-peans arrived but had died out by the eighteenth cen-tury.) The missionaries had more success in the south,which became divided between animists and Chris-tians, with a small number of Muslims.

The relationship between north and south Sudanwas traditionally hostile. The Arabs of the north sentsoldiers, slavers, and bureaucrats to oppress the peo-ples of the south. The Africans felt that the Arabelites in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, were contemptu-ous toward the cultures of the south and treated themas second-class citizens.

Although this view of north-south relations wasnot completely accurate on either side—the Arabs andthe Africans had a complex history, and the Arabswere not always its villains—it was accepted by manysoutherners, encouraging suspicion and distrust.

In 1899, Sudan was conquered by an Anglo-Egyptian army and made a part of the British Empire.Although Sudan was officially the joint conquest ofthe Egyptians and British, it was the British whoactually ruled the country. The British administered

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ETHIOPIA

UGANDAKENYA

CONGO(ZAIRE)

CENTRALAFRICAN

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LIBYA

EGYPT

Khartoum

Port Sudan

Juba

Nile

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White

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ile

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150 300 Miles

ERITREA(since1993)

ARAB

“AFRICAN”ANIMIST-CHRISTIAN

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GHAZAL

DARFURREGION

UPPERNILE

EQUATORIA

Oil fields

Oil p

ipeline

Sudan: Civi l Wars in South, 1955–1972; 19 83–2005 293

north and south Sudan as two separate regions, an ap-proach that many Arabs felt was part of a Britishcolonial policy of divide and conquer. While this be-lief was partially true, the British division of Sudanalso recognized that southerners had not always bene-fited from northern dominance. Whatever the moti-vations, the result was to further divide north fromsouth.

In the 1930s, a growing nationalist movement inthe country began to demand Sudanese independence.In 1953, the British set up a timetable to grant self-rule. Self-government began that same year, and fullindependence came in 1956. The British also gave into the demands of the Arab north that, upon indepen-dence, north and south Sudan would be ruled as one

country. It was this unified Sudan that became an in-dependent nation on January 1, 1956. But many inthe south were unhappy with the outcome.

Revolt in the South

The decision to merge north and south Sudan alien-ated many southerners. The Muslim north not onlywas economically better off, it had three times thepopulation of the south. Southerners were afraid thattheir rights and culture would be ignored by a gov-ernment that was sure to be dominated by the Arabsof Khartoum.

The initial appointments of the new governmentconfirmed southern fears. As hundreds of low-level

KEY DATES

1956 Sudan wins its independence from joint British-Egyptian rule.

1962 Southern Sudanese exiles form the Sudan African National Union,while rebels within the south of Sudan form the Anya-Nya (“Venom ofthe Viper”) rebel movement, which launches its first attack on Sudanesegovernment targets the following year.

1970 Efforts to end infighting among southerners lead southern rebels toform the unified Southern Sudan Liberation Movement.

1972 The Government of Sudan (GOS) and rebel leaders sign the AddisAbaba Agreement on February 28, ending the first phase of the south-ern Sudanese civil war.

1983 When the GOS tries to impose Islamic law in the country, southernarmy units rebel; GOS sends Colonel John Garang, a southerner, to putdown the rebellion, but he joins it instead.

1989 A military coup puts a hard-line Islamic government in power in Khar-toum.

1991 Rebel movement in the south splits along tribal lines.

2001 A separate conflict breaks out between rebels and GOS forces, alongwith government-supported militias, in the western Sudan region ofDarfur.

2002 A cease-fire is declared in southern Sudan, as the two sides meet to dis-cuss a permanent peace agreement.

2005 A final peace and power-sharing agreement is signed between south-ern rebels and the government on January 9; Garang dies in a helicop-ter crash on July 30.

British officials left the country, they were replacedby northerners, with only four posts given to south-erners. Khartoum justified this discrimination byarguing that the south had too small an educatedclass to fill very many government positions. Whilethere was some truth to this contention, it did notprevent the southerners from feeling resentment.

Motivated by their fear of northern power, south-ern politicians demanded that Sudan adopt a federalform of government that would give the south adegree of autonomy. In 1955, some of these politi-cians were arrested and jailed on doubtful charges,prompting the formation of southern mobs in Julyand August to protest Khartoum’s behavior. In smallskirmishes, rioting civilians were shot and killed. InAugust 1955, the Equatoria Corps of the Sudanesearmy (consisting mostly of southerners) rose up in amutiny.

In the first few days of fighting, southern troopsand mobs attacked northern merchants, officials,their wives, and sometimes even their children. Sev-eral hundred northerners were killed in these riots,which were a response to rumors that the northern-ers were planning massacres in the south. Whennorthern troops were sent south to restore order, thesouthern mutineers fled into the bush with theirweapons.

Northern Repression

The unrest in the south simmered from 1955 to1958. Khartoum attempted to reimpose control overthe three southern provinces that were dominated bynon-Muslim Africans (Bahr el Ghazal, Upper Nile,and Equatoria) but was met with passive resistanceby the population, accompanied by occasional out-breaks of violence. Rebel resistance was scattered anduncoordinated. Many southerners who thought that apolitical solution was possible did not support armedresistance.

This mood changed with the 1958 coup d’état ofGeneral Ibrahim Abboud. Whereas the previous Su-danese government had tried to combine repressionwith overtures to cooperative southern leaders, Ab-boud set out to destroy the low-level resistance withharsh measures. Sudanese army units were encour-aged to attack villages that were suspected of beingsympathetic to the rebels. Southern politicians weresilenced, and many were forced to flee the country toavoid arrest.

Abboud’s regime also introduced to Sudan astricter observance of Islam, which he imposed onboth the north and the south. In the south, Arabsreplaced Christian missionary teachers, and Arabicbecame the official language rather than English.Christian churches were burned, and Friday, ratherthan Sunday, was made the official day of rest. Thesepolicies increased the southerners’ animosity towardthe government. Although most southern Sudanesewere animists, the substantial minority of Christianswere often the primary target of government repres-sion so they were at the forefront of the resistance.

Anya-Nya

In 1962, a group of exiled Sudanese southerners cre-ated a political movement that eventually took thename Sudan African National Union (SANU). At thesame time, resistance inside the country coalescedaround a strike by secondary-school students againstdiscrimination by Arab teachers from the north.Many students, along with many non-Arab teachers,fled the persecution that followed the strike andhelped to become the nucleus of a new rebel move-ment: the Anya-Nya.

Anya-Nya translates as “venom of the Gabonviper,” and the newly organized southern fighters in-tended to be as dangerous as poisonous snakes. In1963, the Anya-Nya opened up an offensive that suc-ceeded in temporarily capturing government out-posts in Upper Nile and Equatoria provinces. At firstthe rebels were mostly armed with spears and ma-chetes, along with a few captured rifles. But in 1965,they acquired weapons from Congolese who werefleeing a failed rebellion in the Congo (later renamedZaire). The Anya-Nya also probably received secretsupport from Israel, which disliked the Arab-worldorientation of Sudan’s government. (Khartoum hadsent troops to fight against Israel in the 1967 SixDays’ War.) The Israelis supplied the Anya-Nya withweapons and also hired European mercenaries whocould train the southerners in their use.

The amount of support given to the southernerswas minuscule compared to the military aid that thegovernment in Khartoum received from Egypt andthe Soviet Union. Egypt contributed at least 5,000troops to its fellow Arab state, while the Sovietsprovided sophisticated tanks and aircraft, includingMiG jets and attack helicopters. The Soviet deci-sion to help Khartoum fit in with the general Soviet



policy of supporting Arab states against Israel and itsWestern allies.

The war in the south was characterized by massacreand counter-massacre. Although southern reports ofnorthern atrocities may have been exaggerated, outsidejournalists and aid workers confirmed that the army’sattacks were carried out with great brutality. Evenwhen there were no orders to attack southern villages,it was clear that northern troops, often unable tofind an enemy who hid in the rough countryside, tookout their frustrations on the civilian population. TheAnya-Nya fought back with massacres of their own;when northern outposts were taken, northern civilianswould often be killed. During the repressive Abboudadministration (1958–1964), such attacks becamegovernment policy—Abboud wanted to Islamicizeand Arabize the south. Villages that refused to cooper-ate were often bombed by government planes. An esti-mated 500,000 died during the seventeen years offighting, most of them civilians. Hundreds of thou-sands more were forced to flee their homes, some going

to refugee camps in neighboring Congo, Uganda, andEthiopia. Abboud’s Arabization policies were an at-tempt at cultural genocide.

Politically, the southern Sudanese were handi-capped by their lack of a unified organization. Tribaland political differences among southerners led to thecreation, disbanding, and re-creation of a plethora ofpolitical organizations, including the SANU, the An-zania Liberation Front, and a southern Sudan provi-sional government. These groups often refused tocooperate with each other. In the field, the Anya-Nyawere theoretically united, but in practice they foughtas small, uncoordinated units. Their troops domi-nated the countryside of the south, while the govern-ment held the major towns.

In 1970, this chaos among the insurgents wasended when the various southern opposition groupsagreed to form the Southern Sudan Liberation Move-ment, with the Anya-Nya as their military arm.General Joseph Lagu, a longtime fighter in the Anya-Nya, was put in charge of both organizations. This

With foreign support, the Sudanese rebel organization known as Anya-Nya, or “viper venom,” gained control of thesouthern countryside by the late 1960s. Attacks by both government and guerrilla forces were reported to be ex-tremely brutal. (John Downing/Getty Images)

reorganization made the southerners more effectivefighters; it also made it easier to carry out negotia-tions with the north.

Peace Interval

The drawn-out war in the south helped to undercutAbboud’s power in the north, and he was overthrownin a 1964 civilian uprising. The change in administra-tion led to a brief pause in the fighting, but the newcivilian-led government was equally unwilling to com-promise with southern rebels. The fighting resumed.The new government did not attack southern civiliansas a matter of policy, but government soldiers contin-ued to occasionally attack opposition villages. The gov-ernment also expelled all Christian missionaries, whommany northerners held responsible for originally stir-ring up anti-Arab sentiments among southerners.

In 1969, a group of military officers, tired of Su-dan’s stagnant economy and frustrated by the lack ofsuccess in the war, led a coup against the civilian gov-ernment. The leader of the military coup was ColonelGaafar Mohammed Nimeiri, a relative moderate.Nimeiri continued the war against the south, but hebelieved that some kind of compromise would even-tually be necessary, and so he also attempted to opennegotiations with southern leaders. General Lagu’srise to power in the south made negotiations possible.The south now had one spokesman with whomNimeiri could discuss terms. The two sides met forpeace talks in 1971.

The result of these talks was the Addis AbabaAgreement, signed on February 28, 1972. Nimeiriagreed to merge the three provinces of the south intoone regional state, which would be allowed limitedautonomy. The south was given its own legislature,and religious freedom was to be permitted. Nimeiri’sgovernment was as Islamic in outlook as its predeces-sors, but it was willing to be tolerant toward south-ern beliefs. This peace lasted until 1983.

Turn to Is lam and the Second Civi l War

The peace between north and south held during the1970s, but relations between the two regions beganto cool after 1980. Southerners worried about Sudan’s1980 alliance with Egypt, which seemed to move thecountry closer to the Arab world. The early 1980s

also saw an increase in the influence of the NationalIslamic Front (NIF) and the Muslim Brotherhood,both led by Hassan al-Turabi; during the 1970s and1980s, the NIF infiltrated its members into Sudan’sbureaucracy and military.

In 1983, reacting to the growing power of theseIslamic organizations, Nimeiri appointed Turabi at-torney general of Sudan, and concurred when Turabiruled that in the future, Sharia (Islamic law) wouldbe the basis of Sudanese law. This decision was espe-cially worrisome for the non-Muslim south; amongother harsh penalties, Sharia called for amputatingthe hands of petty thieves.

Already disturbed, the south was outraged byNimeiri’s June 1983 decree that redivided the south-ern region into its original three provinces. Nimeiriclaimed that he only wished to reduce the power ofthe Dinka (the south’s largest ethnic group), butsoutherners, particularly the Dinka, saw this move asan attempt to repeal the Addis Ababa Agreement.

In May 1983, two army garrisons in the south,angry about Nimeiri’s Islamic policies (and worriedthat they might be transferred to the north), mu-tinied in protest. When the government sent ColonelJohn Garang, a Dinka, south to put down the mutiny,he joined it. Garang had been born into a Christianfamily and had spent time in the United States (hegraduated from Grinnell College and earned a Ph.D.in economics at the University of Iowa), and he wasnot happy with the Islamic direction of the Nimeirigovernment. Instead of putting down the mutineers,he encouraged other units in the region to rise upagainst the government, then took control of therebels and led them into the bush, beginning a newguerrilla war against the government. To prosecutethe war, Garang created a political organization, theSudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), anda military wing, the Sudanese People’s LiberationArmy (SPLA).

In many ways, the second Sudanese civil war re-sembled the first. Again the southerners dominatedthe countryside, and again the northerners controlledthe towns. However, unlike the Anya-Nya, whichhad had a broad base of support, Garang’s army wasgrounded in ethnic and personal loyalties. BecauseGarang was a Dinka, most of the top jobs in theSPLA were occupied by Dinkas. Garang also de-manded a level of personal loyalty that disturbed hismore idealistic followers. Southerners who opposedhis methods might find themselves imprisoned in a


porting Islamic terrorist groups around the world. Itwas accused of being connected to both the 1993bombing of New York’s World Trade Center and the1995 attempt to assassinate Egyptian leader HosniMubarak. Sudan also maintained close ties withIraq and Libya, two states that were pariahs in theeyes of much of the world. Because of the interna-tional animosity the Sudanese government had in-spired, Garang and the SPLA received substantialamounts of foreign military support.

The countries providing this support includedEthiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and Eritrea. Ethiopia, anally of the Soviet Union, had been the most importantsupporter in the 1980s, providing arms and equip-ment to Garang’s SPLA, which portrayed itself as aMarxist-Leninist movement. It maintained largetraining camps in southern Ethiopia. In 1991, how-ever, the regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam col-lapsed. At that point, Uganda and Eritrea became theprimary supporters of the SPLA. Both nations aidedthe rebel movement in Sudan because the Khartoumregime was supporting Islamic rebels inside theirborders. In addition, all of Sudan’s southern neigh-bors were black African states that sympathized withthe plight of the African Sudanese. The SPLA mayalso have received covert military aid from theUnited States and Israel. The press reported rumorsthat special U.S. Army detachments carried out clan-destine operations in Sudan.

Internal Fissures and theWidening Civi l War

One of the key handicaps for the south was its di-vided aspect. There were five major ethnic groups—Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, Bari, and Azande—andtraditional ethnic hostilities among them compli-cated efforts to join forces against the north. Thistendency was exacerbated by Garang’s policy of favor-ing his own Dinka people.

In 1991, frustration with Garang’s dictatorialleadership style led Riek Machar, an ethnic Nuer, tobreak away and form his own SPLA United (SPLA-U)faction, in which a number of further splits led to theestablishment of a new group, the Southern SudaneseIndependence Movement (SSIM). On the surface, themotivation for the breakup was policy disagreement—Machar wanted to create an independent south Su-dan, while Garang favored remaining in Sudan as asecular autonomous province. Much of the animosity

pit for months. The treatment meted out to the civil-ian population by the SPLA was harsh. Garang’stroops often acted like an occupying army, acquiringtheir supplies by theft and killing those who ob-jected. Despite Garang’s authoritarian behavior, mostsoutherners stayed loyal to his cause. To them, thethreat of the north required the south to unite behindone leader, even if they disliked his methods.

Is lamic Fundamentalism

Throughout the 1980s, the hard-line Islamists gainedin power and influence. There was a temporary abate-ment in this trend in 1985, when Nimeiri wasoverthrown—the SPLA even opened up negotiationswith the new government—but a 1989 military coupput a new pro-Islamist government into power.

The new government was led by the Revolution-ary Command Council for National Salvation (RCC-NS), whose leader was General Omar Hassan Ahmadal-Bashir. Much of the support for the new regime,however, came from Turabi and his National IslamicFront. Many observers considered Turabi and his Is-lamists to be the real powers in Sudan. Turabi’s goalwas to bring all of Sudan, including the south, intoline with his fundamentalist Islamic views. Al-Bashirand Turabi broke off negotiations with the SPLA andlaunched a full-scale offensive against the southernrebels.

The attacks on the south were carried out with aruthlessness that the war had not seen before. Planesbombed rebel villages, while government-supportedArab militias (called “popular defense forces”) raidedAfrican villages in southern Sudan. International aidagencies accused the government of carrying out a warof genocide against the African south. Certainly muchof the south was depopulated, with hundreds of thou-sands fleeing across Sudan’s borders or north to therelative safety of Khartoum. Those who reached Khar-toum were not harmed; the Sudanese government wasclearly bent not on killing all southerners, but on de-stroying their ability to resist as a culture. Khartoum’sgoal was the Islamization of the entire south.

International Support

The new Sudanese government soon managed toalienate much of the world, including many Arabstates, by its extreme fundamentalist Islamic policies.The United States and others accused Sudan of sup-


between the two, however, seemed to be fueled bypersonal rivalry and competition for power.

Whatever its causes, the intra-SPLA conflict wasa disaster for the south. Garang and Machar spent asmuch of their effort attacking each other and raidingvillages suspected of supporting the opposition asthey did the government. Other, lesser leaders brokeaway from the SPLA and formed their own guerrillabands. The government in Khartoum took advantageof this conflict, occasionally providing support toMachar and the SSIM. In 1996–1997, the SPLA-Uand SSIM signed a political agreement with the gov-ernment in which they gave up their demand for in-dependence. On his part, Garang had managed by1997 to mend some of the breaks in the SPLA, andmany of his former opponents had rejoined his army.

Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s government in Khar-toum had its own problems. Within Khartoum’s Arabsociety, many Muslims opposed the rigidity of thegovernment and the power of Turabi and the NIF.The NIF was reported to have persecuted Muslimsects that differed with the official Muslim ideologyof Sudan. Outside greater Khartoum, other regionsresented the government’s behavior. The westernstate of Darfur was predominantly Muslim, but manyof its people were black Africans, not Arabs, andsome of them voiced dissatisfaction with the way thecentral government treated them.

These strains had the potential of undercuttingKhartoum’s war efforts in the south. In February1992, a coalition of northern opposition parties ledby the Democratic Unionist Party, the Umma Party,and the SPLM created the National Democratic Al-liance (NDA) as an antigovernment umbrella group.It called for a multiparty democracy and the preserva-tion of cultural and ethnic diversity in Sudan. In1995 the NDA members agreed on the secular char-acter of future government and on a referendum onself-determination for the south. In October 1996, ajoint NDA military command under John Garangwas established. These developments opened a north-eastern front in the civil war, transforming what hadbeen a predominantly ethnic and religious conflictinto a center-periphery conflict. While the SPLA re-mained suspicious about the long-term goals oftheir new allies, in 1997 the NDA successfully co-ordinated military operations in areas along the bor-ders with Ethiopia and Eritrea. There were evenrumors about preparations for a joint NDA march onKhartoum.

Stalemate and Cease-fire

By 1998, the war in south Sudan was a continuingstalemate in which neither side appeared capableof mounting a decisive military effort. Governmentforces conducted indiscriminate aerial bombard-ments and used helicopter gunships to attack in-surgents, supply bases, and civilian targets, withparticularly devastating effects. In 1999, those sameforces carried out sixty-five aerial attacks on civil tar-gets, mostly in Bahr El Ghazal, Eastern Equatoria,and the Southern Blue Nile regions; in 2000, thenumber of such attacks grew to 132, and in 2001 to195. The Islamic government controlled the majorcities of the Nile River valley, although it was tightlybesieged by insurgents. The rebels dominated thevillages and smaller towns of the countryside. Garangand the SPLA were estimated to have about 25,000hard-core fighters, with tens of thousands more whojoined the fighting when it threatened their owndistricts. The SPLM had established some govern-ment functions in the areas it controlled, setting upan administration, collecting taxes, creating a judi-cial system, and training a police force. Under pres-sure from his supporters in Eritrea and Uganda,Garang had altered his dictatorial leadership style,allowing public criticism of his policies and shar-ing power with members of other tribes (althoughDinkas still tended to dominate the higher ranks ofthe SPLA).

Perhaps for these reasons, or because of increasedforeign aid, Garang was able to recover from thesplits that damaged his movement after 1991. By1998, the SPLA had regained control of most ofEquatoria and had the provincial capital of Juba al-most completely cut off from the north. His im-proved circumstances and well-equipped fightingforce, which had evolved into a conventional army,gave him a better chance of being able to seize mostof the south. In addition, political support from theUnited States had become more open. In January1998, Garang and other rebel leaders met with U.S.Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in Uganda.Washington still denied providing military aid, butGarang’s 1998 offensives were backed by heavy ar-tillery and Russian-made tanks. These were obviouslynot built in south Sudan.

The war had also turned southern Sudan intoone large refugee camp, according to internationalmonitors. Millions of villagers had fled government


attacks or been forced to leave by fighting betweenrebel factions. The refugee crisis was aggravated bywidespread food shortages. The United Nations setup a special relief effort to help the starving popula-tion in the south. On average, the UN delivered(mainly by air drops) about 70, 000 tons of food sup-plies per year.

The grim irony of the Sudanese war was that, be-cause of the shortage of competent local pilots, theUN hired Russian airmen to carry out the risky fooddrops in war-torn areas. Meanwhile, the governmentalso hired Russians to bomb the same areas. A few, itwas rumored in the media, performed both jobs inturn. Some of the southern refugees moved north toKhartoum, filling shantytowns around the city; oth-ers spilled into neighboring countries, taking theconflict with them. Khartoum was accused of sup-porting Islamic rebels in Uganda and Eritrea.

Steps Toward Peace

As early as 1993, the antagonists in the long warwere seeking a political solution. The military stale-mate continued, and the south was overwhelmed by ahumanitarian crisis in which hundreds of thousandsof refugees were at risk of death by starvation or dis-ease. Sudan’s neighbors, fearing that the conflict couldspread, took a strong role in seeking a comprehensivepeace agreement. Eritrea, Ethiopia, Uganda, andKenya collaborated within the regional association—the Intergovernmental Authority on Development(IGAD), which includes also Sudan and Somalia—topromote the peace initiative based on a settlement ofthe relationship between mosque and state in Sudan,power sharing between the government and the op-position, and resource sharing between Khartoumand the provinces.

The southerners, who made up only 25 percent ofSudan’s population, still faced formidable problems.Fortunately, they could achieve many of their goalswithout invading the north or overthrowing the Su-danese government. Even the SPLA was ready for apolitical settlement. At first, the Khartoum govern-ment tried to maneuver, signing agreements withsome rebel factions in a framework it called “peacefrom within.” After significant battle losses to theSPLA in 1997, however, the regime agreed to a morecomprehensive framework for ending the war. Thisplan included the separation of mosque and state inSudan and self-determination for the southern region,

as proposed by the IGAD. The government hopedthat by making peace it could improve the country’srelations with other nations in the region. In Decem-ber 1999, Sudan and Uganda also signed an accordagreeing not to provide support to rebel forces ineach other’s countries.

The IGAD mediation efforts were strongly sup-ported by the United States and Great Britain. Thesecountries, as well as Italy and Norway, formed an in-ternational observer group to help find a peaceful so-lution. In September 2001, President George W.Bush appointed former senator John Danforth as hisenvoy to Sudan to explore a prospective U.S. role inthe peace process. The widespread U.S. perception ofthe Sudanese civil war as religious (Islamists vs.Christians) and ethnic (Arabs vs. black Africans)prompted an informal and unlikely alliance of thereligious right and the Congressional Black Caucusin support of an active American role in seeking asettlement.

In January 2002 a tentative cease-fire agreementbetween the parties was negotiated under U.S. medi-ation, although sporadic fighting continued for thefirst half of the year. Particularly fierce fighting oc-curred in the oil-rich Western Upper Nile region onthe contested border between north and south, wheregovernment forces tried to grab as many oil fields asthey could.

Following further negotiations, a preliminarypeace agreement was concluded between the SPLAand Sudanese government on July 20, 2002, inMachakos, Kenya. The agreement provided a frame-work for future talks on ending the conflict: a six-yearinterim period preceding a referendum on southernself-determination and the exemption of the southfrom Islamic law. On July 27, 2002, Omar al-Bashirand John Garang met for the first time in Kampala,Uganda. In talks that ran through 2004, the partiesagreed on a complete cessation of hostilities, a power-sharing arrangement, and economic cooperation. Thecomprehensive agreement was signed in Naivisha,Kenya, on May 26, 2004.

Peace and the Future

The final peace accord between the Sudanese govern-ment and the SPLM marked the end of Africa’slongest civil war and one of the most devastating warsin its history. It was signed on January 9, 2005, inNairobi, Kenya. The document confirmed all political



an oppressive Muslim Goliath in the north. Al-though there was an element of truth to this charac-terization, it ignored the complexity of the conflict,which was fueled by not only historic and religiousissues but also by the ambitions of Sudanese leadersand the actions of outside forces.

The prospects for peace in Sudan were dealt yetanother serious blow with the death of John Garangin a helicopter crash on July 30, 2005. His entranceinto Khartoum months earlier had attracted a crowdof more than 1 million, and his death was mournedthroughout the south. It also touched off a new waveof violence, as southerners in Khartoum, suspectingfoul play, began riots in which some 130 people werekilled.

Carl Skutsch and Peter Jacob Rainow

See also: Ethnic and Religious Conflicts; Sudan: Conflict inDarfur Since 2002; Uganda: Civil Conflict Since 1980.

BibliographyAbdel-Rahim, M., et al. Sudan Since Independence. Brookfield,

VT: Gower, 1986.Eprile, Cecil. War and Peace in the Sudan, 1955–1972. New-

ton Abbot, UK: David and Charles, 1974.Hold, Peter Malcom, and Michele W. Daly. A History of the

Sudan from the Coming of Islam to the Present Day. New York:Longman, 1988.

Johnson, Douglas Hamilton. The Root Cases of Sudan’s CivilWars. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.

Jok, Madok Jok. War and Slavery in Sudan. Philadelphia: Uni-versity of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.

O’Balance, Edgar. Sudan Civil War and Terrorism, 1956–1999.New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

Voll, John Obert. Historical Dictionary of the Sudan. Lanham,MD: Scarecrow Press, 1992.

Woodward, Peter. Sudan 1898–1989: The Unstable State.Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1990.

provisions agreed by the parties in the 2002–2004talks. Additionally, it called for national electionswithin four years, the drafting of a new constitutionwithin six years, the creation of a transitional, power-sharing government in Khartoum, making Garangfirst vice president of the country, and a 70–30 north-south member ratio in a new national assembly. Theagreement also stipulated a 50–50 split of oil profitsbetween the north and south. As first vice president,Garang was to head a separate administration for thesouth; the SPLA would keep its forces in the southand withdraw from the east, while the governmentwould withdraw from the south in two-and-a-halfyears. A UN peacekeeping force of 10,000 was to bedeployed in Sudan to oversee the agreement. TheAfrican Union also agreed to provide up to 4,000peacekeeping troops. Thus ended a war that hadlasted more than two decades, claimed some 2 millionlives by combat, starvation, and disease, and led to thedislocation of 4 million people.

Prospects for peace in Sudan were overshadowedafter 2003 by still another internal war, this one inthe country’s western Darfur region. By 2006, addi-tional hundreds of thousands had died, and the con-flict threatened to engulf neighboring Chad as well.As for the south, the ruined region remained one ofthe poorest in the world. There was no electricity andnot a single stretch of paved road across an area thesize of France and Germany combined. The south re-mained unstable and deeply divided along ethniclines and by tribal, political, and personal loyalties.In late 2004, there was a failed revolt against Garangby some SPLA officers who favored immediate andcomplete independence for the south.

Western media often portrayed the Sudanese con-flict as one of a Christian David in the south fighting

301

Sudan is geographically the largest nation in Africa.Approximately one-fourth the size of the UnitedStates, it shares borders with nine countries: Chad,Libya, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, De-mocratic Republic of the Congo, and the CentralAfrican Republic. Its population of nearly 40 millionpeople is among the most diverse in Africa, repre-senting some 130 languages and dialects. Accordingto the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), about52 percent of the population may be classified as non-Arab. The non-Arab population is often referred toas “black Africans.” This term can be misleading,however, as all Sudanese are dark-skinned. The vast

majority of the population (some 75 percent) is Mus-lim, though 20 percent practice indigenous religions,and 5 percent, mainly in the southern region, areChristian. Most Sudanese (68 percent) live in ruralareas, while 32 percent are urban dwellers, and about7 percent are nomadic. Sudan is also one of the poor-est nations in the world; it ranks 139 out of 177 na-tions on the UN Human Development Index.

Since achieving independence from the UnitedKingdom and Egypt in 1956, Sudan has beenwracked by civil war and despotic governments forall but approximately ten years. President OmarHassan al-Bashir took power in June 1989, when,along with other military officers, he carried out acoup d’état against the democratically elected gov-ernment of Sadiqu Al-Mahdi. A former paratrooper,Bashir had fought with Egypt against Israel in the1973 war. On his return to Sudan, he served as thecommander of numerous assaults on the SudanesePeople’s Liberation Army (SPLA), fighting an inde-pendence struggle in the south in the early 1980s.As for the reason behind the coup, al-Bashir assertedthat his purpose was to “save the country from rottenpolitical parties.”

In collaboration with Hassan al-Turabi, the fun-damentalist leader of the National Islamic Front(NIF), al-Bashir made Sudan an “Islamic state.” In do-ing so, al-Turabi dissolved parliament, placed a banon all political parties, and closed down all media out-lets except that of the government of Sudan. However,suspicious of the ever-increasing power of al-Turabi,al-Bashir in December 1999 issued a state of emer-gency and kicked al-Turabi out of the government. Ina rigged election, in which most of the oppositionparty members were fearful of running, Bashir easilywon the presidency. Shortly thereafter, the military ar-rested al-Turabi. Accused of planning a coup and,later, interfering with government matters, al-Turabihas been imprisoned off and on since 2000.

SUDAN: Conflict in Darfur Since 2002TYPE OF CONFLICT: Ethnic and ReligiousPARTICIPANTS: African Union

ETHIOPIA

UGANDA KENYA

CENTRALAFRICAN

REPUBLIC

S U D A N

CHAD

LIBYA

EGYPT

Khartoum

Al Fashir

Nyala

Al Junaynah

Nile

River

White

Nile

BlueN

ile

0


150 300 Miles

ERITREA(since1993)

NORTHERN

DARFUR

SOUTHERNDARFUR

WESTERNDARFUR

SOUTHERN SUDAN

ZAGHAWA

MASALIT

FUR

“AFRICAN”CHRISTIAN-ANIMIST

AREA

Major Janjaweedattack areaMain Ethnic Groupsof Darfur Region

FUR

RE

DS

EA


A civil war between the Khartoum-based govern-ment forces and rebels in the south, the Sudanese Peo-ple’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M), lastedfrom 1983 to 2005, constituting the longest-runningconflict in Africa. The resulting violence cost the livesof about 4 million people. As many as 4 million otherswere forcibly displaced from their homes.

After the al-Qaeda terror attacks of September11, 2001, the United States began cultivating rela-tions with Sudan as a potential ally in the waragainst terrorism. (Osama bin Laden lived in Sudanfor several years and used the country as a base, buthad been expelled by the Sudanese government in1996). The United States led an effort, with theUnited Kingdom and Norway, to promote negotia-tions to end the north-south conflict. After a series

of talks during 2002 and 2003, a ComprehensivePeace Agreement (CPA) was signed in Nairobi onJanuary 9, 2005. The CPA provided for the sharingof power between the government of Sudan andleaders of the SPLA/M and determined that themain rebel leader, John Garang, would become firstvice president of Sudan. Another important provi-sion of the CPA called for the sharing of revenuesfrom oil, which had begun to be pumped from thesouth in 1999, between the north and the south.Six years after the signing of the CPA, the southwould be permitted to hold a referendum for self-determination and independence. A shadow was castover the prospects for lasting peace when JohnGarang was killed in an unexplained helicoptercrash on July 30, 2005.

KEY DATES

1956 Sudan wins its independence from joint British-Egyptian rule.

1983 Civil war breaks out in the south of the country between rebels of theSudanese Liberation Army (SLA) and the government of Sudan.

1989 General Omar Hassan al-Bashir takes power in a military coup; he gov-erns in collaboration with National Islamic front leader Hassan al-Turabi.

1991 Arab militias begin attacking non-Arab villagers in the Darfur region inwestern Sudan.

1999 Al-Bashir forces al-Turabi out of power and declares a state of emer-gency.

2001 Two non-Arab rebel groups begin fighting the Arab-dominated govern-ment in the Darfur region.

2003 Various rebel groups join forces to form the Darfur Liberation Front(DLF); government forces and Arab militias known as Janjaweed en-gage in widespread attacks on non-Arab villagers in Darfur.

2004 The U.S. House of Representatives declares that government and jan-jaweed attacks in Darfur constitute genocide; the African Union beginsits deployment of peacekeepers to the region.

2005 The UN Commission of Inquiry concludes that crimes against humanityare being perpetrated in Darfur by the government of Sudan and thejanjaweed it supports; a peace agreement is signed between southernSudanese rebels and the government of Sudan.

Emergence of Genocidal Confl ict

Although Darfur—a region in northwestern Sudansharing borders with Libya, Chad, and the CentralAfrican Republic—was not directly involved in thenorth-south civil war, festering problems in that re-gion were to lead to an ongoing conflict there that hasbeen labeled “genocide” by the government of theUnited States, other nations, and a number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Prior to the conflict, Darfur was home to approx-imately 6 million people, virtually all of them Mus-lim. Darfur shares the ethnic diversity of Sudan,containing between forty and ninety ethnic groups ortribes, depending on how one defines what consti-tutes an ethnic group. Darfur is one of the most un-derdeveloped and isolated regions of Sudan, withvery few roads, schools, or hospitals. It is also an areathat has often been wracked by conflict.

According to some observers, the seeds of the con-flict in Darfur were sown in the 1980s, when fightingin neighboring Chad’s civil war spilled into westernDarfur. More specifically, while Darfur was comprisedof people who were largely Muslim, roughly 40 per-cent were not Arab and felt closer ethnic ties to groupsin Chad. This aggravated traditional tensions betweenthe non-Arab Fur and Zaghawa ethnic groups. Fur-ther, many Fur felt that Khartoum not only encour-aged but also supported their enemies, a feeling thatsparked Fur attacks on government installations inDarfur. Adding to the unrest was the ongoing droughtand near famine that began to plague the Darfur re-gion in the mid-1980s, and the fact that Khartoumvirtually ignored the plight of the Darfurians.

While much of the region is dry, burning desert(except during a short rainy season), there are areaswhere crops are cultivated and cattle grazed. The pro-ductive land is occupied, in the main, by sedentaryfarmers and cattle owners, who have tended to beblack African. At certain times of the year, however,the farmland has traditionally been used by semi-nomadic Arab peoples for grazing their cattle andcamels, which in turn fertilized and renewed the soilfor subsequent growing seasons. Disputes among thetwo groups were traditionally settled by local leadersof the African and Arab tribal groups. This symbioticrelationship, however, began to disintegrate duringthe 1970s and 1980s, when drought and spreading

desertification intensified competition for increasinglyscarce resources.

The drought also affected other countries in theregion, and nomads from Chad and Libya migratedto Darfur in search of grazing land, which put furtherpressure on the available resources. At the same time,weapons began to flow into Darfur from neighboringcountries, as well as from the civil war raging in thesouth of Sudan. Tensions between non-Arabs andArabs were also aggravated by the political ideologyof Arab supremacy that emanated from Khartoumduring the early 1980s.

These factors, along with the fact that Khartoumput little or no money into the infrastructure of Dar-fur (such as roads, schools, water systems), angeredvarious tribal groups (including the Fur, Masalit, andZaghawa). This anger continued to simmer and grewincreasingly volatile as the drought and famine tookan ever-greater toll on residents.

By the 1990s, traditional dispute resolution ap-proaches proved inadequate, and non-Arabs andArabs alike began to form local armed self-defenseunits to protect land and animals. As early as 1991,armed Arab militias formed and engaged in attacksagainst non-Arab villages and settlements. In August1995, for example, Arab raiders attacked and burnedthe non-Arab village of Mejmeri in west Darfur,stealing 40,000 cattle and massacring 23 civilians.By late 1998, more than 100,000 non-Arab Masalithad fled to Chad to escape the violent attacks.

Adding to this mix of issues was the generalnotion held by many Darfurians that, while the con-flict in the south was being attended to and result-ing in shared governance and shared resources,Darfur continued to be neglected and ignored. Thecommixture of all these factors induced the forma-tion of rebel groups and attacks on the Sudanesegovernment.

In 2001 and 2002, before the conflict becamewidely known to the outside world, a rebel move-ment began to form among non-Arabs in Darfur,largely drawn from the self-defense forces that hadbeen formed previously. Two main rebel groupsemerged—the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) and the Justice and EqualityMovement (JEM)—both of which, in addition towanting to provide local security for non-Arabs,protested against the economic and political margin-alization of Darfur and claimed to speak on behalf of

Sudan: Confl ict in Darfur Since 2002 303


all Darfurians, both Arab and non-Arab. Members ofboth rebel groups came primarily (but by no meansexclusively) from three non-Arab tribes—the Fur,Masalit, and Zaghawa—that had been attacked byArab militias. Leaders of both groups closely ob-served the ongoing peace negotiations between thegovernment and the southern rebels and realized thatarmed insurrection eventually led to concessions bythe government, including power sharing and accessto economic resources.

As is often the case, the history of the diverserebel groups is a messy affair. In February 2003, vari-ous rebels formed the Darfur Liberation Front, whichdeclared its opposition to the government of Sudan.Not a month later, in mid-March, the Darfur Libera-tion Front changed its name to the Sudan LiberationMovement and the Sudan Liberation Army (SLM/SLA). While the Darfur Liberation Front called forthe secession of Darfur from Sudan, the SLA’s secre-tary general, Mini Arkoi Minawi, asserted that itsaim was to “create a united, democratic Sudan.”

The other major rebel group, the Justice andEquality Movement (JEM), was said to be supportedby Sudanese opposition leader Hassan al-Turabi, whoonce served as the speaker of Sudan’s parliament andwas considered the main ideologue of Sudan’s Is-lamist revolution. In May 2000, he was unceremoni-ously kicked out of the government and imprisoned.

The first rebel attack involving Fur, Masalit, andZaghawa forces against a government military base isgenerally believed to have taken place on February 25,2002. Alarmed by the violence spreading in Darfur,but with its military forces stretched thin by the north-south civil war, the Sudanese government recruited,trained, and equipped Arab militias to suppress therebellion in the province. According to Gerard Prunier,a veteran journalist of African civil wars, the so-calledJanjaweed (meaning, variously, “hordes,” “ruffians,”or “men or devils on horseback”) had been used by theSudanese leadership since the late 1980s to supple-ment government troops in the fight against southernrebels.

Members of the Justice and Equality Movement, a rebel group in the western Sudanese province of Darfur, travel tobase camp in May 2004. Fighting escalated between government-backed Arab “Janjaweed” militia and largely non-Arab rebel factions in the province. (Daniel Pepper/Getty Images News)

if not most, of the ground attacks were precededby aerial bombardment from Antonov bombers, gov-ernment military aircraft. Apparently running outof ordnance at times, the government reportedly re-sorted to dropping heavy pieces of metal, includingold appliances. A few survivors reported that a yellow,wet substance was dropped on them from the planes,and that it caused great sickness among the people.The bombings were generally followed by attacks byhundreds of Janjaweed racing into the village onhorseback and camels, followed close behind by four-wheeled vehicles, many with mounted guns.

As of early 2006, tens of thousands of Darfurianshad been forced into internally displaced person(IDP) camps in the region; others had made their wayto refugee camps in Chad, not knowing whether theirloved ones had survived. Some young women werereportedly kidnapped and forced to become concu-bines of the Janjaweed and soldiers.

Not content with terrorizing the population,chasing them off, and looting their villages, the gov-ernment troops and Janjaweed would frequently fol-low black Africans into the hills and mountains, shootthe men, and rape the women and girls. Wells, criticalto human life and essential livestock, were poisonedby tossing in dead bodies. As many as 2,000 blackAfrican villages had been destroyed by early 2006.Close to 2 million people were residing in poorlyequipped IDP camps, which were attacked at will.

Although the government of Sudan repeatedlydenied sponsoring or supporting the Janjaweed, the2005 UN Commission of Inquiry in Darfur foundthat “the large majority of attacks on villages con-ducted by the [Janjaweed] militia have been under-taken with the acquiescence of State officials.”

International Awareness

By late 2003, the world began to take notice of the es-calating carnage in Darfur, as hundreds of thousandsof civilians were forcibly displaced from their homesand villages. In December, Jan Egeland, UN under-secretary for humanitarian affairs, asserted that theDarfur crisis was possibly the “worst in the world to-day.” In the same month, Tom Vraalsen, the UN secu-rity general’s special envoy for humanitarian affairs forSudan, claimed that the situation in Darfur was“nothing less than the organized destruction of seden-tary African agriculturalists—the Fur, the Masalit,and the Zaghawa.”

On May 1, 2002, a group of Fur politicians com-plained to Sudanese president al-Bashir that 181 vil-lages had been attacked by Arab militias, withhundreds of people killed and thousands of animalsstolen. In early 2003, a series of attacks by rebelsforces against government installations and troopscaused humiliation, alarm, and anger in Khartoum.On April 25, 2003, which some experts have called acritical turning point in the war, the SLA and JEMforces struck the government air force base at AlFashir. The rebels killed at least 75 people at thebase, destroyed several airplanes and bombers, andcaptured the base commander. Then in May, the SLAattacked a Sudanese battalion and killed 500 soldiers.Other successful attacks followed. According to West-ern journalists in mid-2003, the rebels were winningmost of the encounters, and the government feared itwould lose the province.

In response to rebel victories, government leadersput the Darfur crisis in the hands of its powerfulMilitary Intelligence agency, which directed govern-ment soldiers and the Janjaweed militias to expandthe counterinsurgency campaign from rebel forces tocivilians from the three main tribes—Fur, Masalit,and Zagahawa—from which the rebels came. Theman heading up the Sudanese intelligence agencywas Major General Salah Abdallah Gosh, who, ac-cording to a United Nations document leaked in Feb-ruary 2006, was one of seventeen individuals whomthe UN was considering for possible prosecution forhis involvement in the Darfur conflict.

The escalating violence led to hundreds of thou-sands of deaths and millions of people forcibly dis-placed from their homes and forced to eke out anexistence in camps within Darfur or, if they were lucky,across the border in neighboring Chad. Tribal leaderstargeted by the government and Janjaweed asserted,time and again, that, as journalist John Pike quotedthem, “the depopulation of villages and consequentchanges in land ownership are part of a governmentstrategy to change the whole democracy of the regionof Darfur.”

Beginning in early 2003, the Janjaweed and gov-ernment troops engaged in widespread and systematicattacks against non-Arab villages in Darfur, slaugh-tering men, raping women, abducting or killing chil-dren, looting household goods and animals, andburning the villages to the ground. The initial attackswere often carried out in the early hours of the morn-ing, thereby catching the victims off-guard. Many,

Sudan: Confl ict in Darfur Since 2002 305


In 2004, the government and citizens of theUnited States, which was engaged in wars inAfghanistan and Iraq, began to express alarm over thesituation in Darfur. On June 16, members of the U.S.House of Representatives and Senate issued a warn-ing to Sudan to desist from its violent actions or facefinancial sanctions or legal consequences. On June24, the House unanimously declared that the situa-tion in Darfur constituted genocide. A week later,Secretary of State Colin Powell visited an IDP campin the province and a refugee camp in Chad. UN Sec-retary General Kofi Annan also made a personal visit.

In July and August 2004, the United States—in ajoint effort of the U.S. State Department, the Coalitionof International Justice (CIJ), and the U.S. Agency forInternational Aid (USAID)—sent a team of investiga-tors, the Atrocities Documentation Team (ADT), toconduct interviews with Sudanese refugees from Dar-fur and collect evidence to ascertain whether genocidehad been perpetrated by the Sudanese government andJanjaweed on the black population. Upon analyzingthe data, the U.S. government declared that genocideindeed had been perpetrated in Darfur.

The United States referred the matter to the UNSecurity Council. The Commission of Inquiry (COI),established by Security Council Resolution 1564 onSeptember 18, 2004, conducted in-depth investiga-tions in Khartoum, Darfur, Chad, Ethiopia, and Er-itrea from November 2004 through January 2005.The commission declared that crimes against human-ity had been perpetrated in Darfur. Although it didnot come to a finding of genocide, further investiga-tions might reveal that genocidal activity in fact hadbeen committed. In its report, the COI stated, “Thepillaging and destruction of villages, being con-ducted on a systematic as well as widespread basis ina discriminatory fashion, appears to have been di-rected to bring about the destruction of the liveli-hoods and means of survival of these populations.”

Failed Peace Talks, LimitedInternational Intervention

The rebel groups (SPLA/M and JEM) and governmentof Sudan began a series of peace talks in mid-2004,the chief results of which have been recrimination and

walkouts. Making the process even more difficult wasthe splintering of rebel groups, with each new off-shoot claiming a place at the peace talks. Meanwhile,the government, the Janjaweed, and the rebels contin-ued to battle one another viciously.

The African Union deployed peacekeeping troopsto Darfur in 2004, but the number proved too smallto make a difference. The initial force was just 150soldiers, followed by another three hundred. The to-tal eventually reached about 7,000, but most analystsbelieved that at least two or three times that numberwas needed to quell the violence. Moreover, thepeacekeepers were undertrained, underarmed, andworking under a mandate that did not allow them toengage in battle. Instead, they were allowed only toprotect the human rights monitors on the groundand to act in self-defense. The AU, meanwhile, in-sisted that Darfur is an “African problem” that mustbe solved by African nations, and it refused to allowthe UN to send in troops to assist with the effort.Recognizing that it was severely outmanned and out-gunned, however, the AU did begin to consider sug-gestions that UN troops ought to be deployed inDarfur. As of March 2006, the UN, along with vari-ous nations, was exploring the possibility of replacingAfrican Union troops with a more robust interna-tional peacekeeping force. The Sudanese government,of course, balked at the suggestion, and the conflictraged on.

Samuel Totten and Eric Markusen

See also: Ethnic and Religious Conflicts; Sudan: Civil War inSouth, 1955–1972; 1983–2005.

BibliographyDe Waal, Alex, and Alexander De Waal. Famine That Kills:

Darfur, Sudan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.Flint, Julie, and Alex de Waal. Darfur: A Short History of a

Long War. New York: Zed Books, 2005.Power, Samantha. “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of

Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 2002.Prunier, Gerard. Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide. Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 2005.United Nations. UN Commission of Inquiry: Darfur Conflict.

New York: United Nations, 2005.U.S. State Department. “Documenting Atrocities in Darfur.”

State Publication 11182. Washington, DC, September 9,2004.

TOGO: Coups and Political Unrest,1963–1990sTYPE OF CONFLICT: Coups; Ethnic and Religious

307

Until the establishment of a German protectorate inthe 1880s, the territory of what is now Togo servedas a buffer zone between the often-warring Asanteand Dahomey states. In 1914, Togo was seized byBritish and French colonial troops in neighboringGold Coast and Dahomey, now Benin. FollowingWorld War I, the colony was divided into French-and British-administered zones under a League ofNations mandate. This partition divided the Ewepeople.

Following World War II, the British and Frenchgovernments placed their spheres under a UNtrusteeship. The Ewe’s pleas to have their territoryunited were refused since much of their territory layin the British colony of the Gold Coast. Following aplebiscite in 1957, however, the British sphere wasincorporated into the newly independent state ofGhana, while the French territory became an inde-pendent nation within the French Community.

Politics during the last years of French controland the early years of independence were dominatedby one family. The two major parties—the United To-golese Committee and the Togolese Progress Party—were headed by brothers-in-law Nicolas Grunitzkyand Sylvanus Olympio, respectively. Grunitzky wonthe first election for prime minister in 1956, whileOlympio succeeded him in the 1958 elections, on aplatform of Ewe unification.

The Olympio regime, however, became increas-ingly authoritarian during the first years of indepen-dence, forcing Grunitzky and other opponents intojail or exile. Olympio was overthrown and killed inthe first military coup in postcolonial Africa, in1963. The coup leader, Sergeant Etienne Eyadéma,asked Grunitzky to return from exile to become headof state. Grunitzky’s efforts to achieve constitutionalmultiparty democracy failed, however, and Eyadémaassumed full power in 1967.

Eyadéma’s Rule

Over the course of the next ten years, Eyadéma at-tempted to create a one-party state around the To-golese People’s Assembly (RPT). Numerous attemptsto overthrow him, however, including an allegedmercenary invasion headed by several sons of Olym-pio, kept the nation in a state of political turmoil

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throughout most of the 1970s. During those years,Eyadéma kept firm control over the politics of thecountry, while the main opposition group—the To-golese Movement for Democracy (MTD)—remainedin exile in Ghana.

In March 1985, the first general elections wereheld under the 1980 constitution, though the RPTwas the only party permitted to field candidates foroffice. Two months later, however, other parties werepermitted to form. Nevertheless, this reform cametoo late to prevent more political unrest, including aseries of bomb attacks in the capital of Lomé. Thegovernment blamed the MTD and Ghanaian author-ities, who responded with charges that the RPT hadused the bomb attacks as a pretext for political re-pression, including the arrests of a number of MTDactivists.

In September 1986, some nineteen persons weredetained after an attempt to seize the main army bar-racks in Lomé, the RPT headquarters, and the na-tional radio station. More than a dozen persons,including six civilians, were killed in the attack. TheRPT once again blamed foreign governments for theattempted coup, including Ghana and Burkina Faso.The borders of the country were sealed, and some 600French and Zairean troops were flown in to protect

the government. Several opposition leaders, includ-ing Gilchrist Olympio, son of the former president,were sentenced to death in absentia.

Efforts to restore constitutional rule in 1990 weredenounced by the opposition as a sham, leading tostudent boycotts and clashes between protesters andtroops. Continuing demonstrations led to the closingof all schools in April 1991, a government announce-ment of a general amnesty, and the legalization of po-litical parties. The news, however, was overshadowedby the discovery of twenty-six bodies in a Lomé la-goon, which the opposition claimed were those ofprotesters killed by security forces.

Continuing Polit ical and Ethnic Unrest

In August 1991, a national conference—with a reha-bilitated Gilchrist Olympio in attendance—was con-vened to offer constitutional and political reformsand to find a way of cooling tensions between the Eweand Kabiye ethnic groups, the former largely in theopposition and the latter generally supporting thegovernment. When the conference voted to suspendmost of Eyadéma’s powers, however, the head of statecanceled the meetings and established an interim

KEY DATES

1960 Togo wins its independence from France.

1963 President Sylvanus Olympio is overthrown and killed in a militarycoup led by Sergeant Etienne Eyadéma, who calls on former op-position leader Nicolas Grunitzky to form a new government.

1967 After Grunitzky fails to establish a multiparty democracy, Eya-dema assumes full power.

1985 First multiparty elections are held under the 1980 constitution.

1986 An effort to seize the government in a coup is thwarted; the gov-ernment blames foreign governments for the coup attempt andseals the borders.

1990 Opposition parties denounce government efforts to restoredemocracy as a sham.

1991–1997 Prodemocracy protests against Eyadéma rule grow in size and in-tensity.

military base—again blamed on Olympio and theGhana government—forced their postponement un-til February.

The elections resulted in the victory of a coalitionof opposition parties but did not resolve the politicalviolence plaguing the country. In October came anattack on the Togolese Office of Phosphates, the gov-ernment agency that administered the country’s mainindustry. Continued unrest marred the transition todemocracy, especially after the opposition coalitionfell apart through defections to the party of Eyadéma.This led to a rally of some 100,000 supporters of theopposition in the capital in May 1997, at whichEyadéma was accused of manipulating the politicalsystem. Eyadéma ran for reelection in 1998 and won,but there were reports that thousands were killed inpostelection violence.

Eyedéma was expected to retire in 2003, but hedecided to run still again. He died in 2003 after thirty-eight years in power in Togo. The military installed hisson, Faure Gnassingbe, causing violent protests by op-position parties. Soon afterward, Gnassinbe was electedto the presidency to succeed his father.

James Ciment

See also: Coups.

BibliographyEconomist Intelligence Unit. Country Report: Togo, Niger,

Benin, Burkina Faso. London: Economic Intelligence Unit,1986–1996.

Greene, Sandra. Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Up-per Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe. Portsmouth, NH:Heinemann, 1996.

Verdon, Michel. The Abutia Ewe of West Africa: A ChiefdomThat Never Was. New York: Mouton, 1983.

Togo: Coups and Polit ical Unrest , 19 63–19 9 0s 309

government under the control of the High Council ofthe Republic (HCR). Eyadéma then agreed to relin-quish control of the government, though he remainedhead of the military.

This arrangement was a recipe for further politi-cal discord. Loyal to Eyadéma, the army seized con-trol of the state broadcasting services in Lomé onOctober 1, after the government had failed to paytheir salaries. The troops demanded the resignationof the HCR, but Eyadéma ordered them to return totheir barracks. Some five people were killed in theunrest. A week later, the presidential guards, underthe command of Eyadéma’s half-brother, attemptedto arrest the prime minister and head of the HCR,Joseph Kokou Koffigoh. This move resulted in moredeaths and the arrests of Eyadéma’s half-brother andseveral other officers.

Unrest between Eyadéma and Koffigoh support-ers continued throughout the fall of 1991, as a com-mittee attempted to draft a new constitution. InNovember, troops were called out to put down theprotests and impose a curfew on the capital, but out-breaks of violence continued into the early part of1992. In early May, an assassination attempt againstOlympio was blamed on the army, resulting in a two-day general strike in Lomé. Continued unrest pre-vented the scheduling of elections for the rest of theyear and into 1993. In March, an attack on the mili-tary camp in Lomé, where Eyadéma kept his resi-dence, was blamed on supporters of Olympio. InApril, an announcement of June elections for presi-dent was made, but the poll was delayed after a seriesof bomb attacks on both government and oppositiontargets in May. New elections were scheduled for Jan-uary 1994, but another armed attack on Eyadéma’s

310

Like other countries in the Great Lakes region ofEast Africa, Uganda is a mélange of ethnic groups,largely divided between Nilotic-Sudanese people inthe north and Bantu-speakers in the south. Also likethe other small Great Lakes states of Rwanda andBurundi, densely populated Uganda was ruled by acentralized monarchy during the immediate precolo-nial period—the royal house of Buganda, with aking, a council of ministers, and a parliament. Dom-inated by the Buganda people of the southern half ofthe country, Uganda’s population had extensive con-tacts with the outside world, primarily for purposesof trade.

The first British explorers arrived in Ugandain the 1860s, searching for the source of the Nile.A decade later, missionaries both Protestant andCatholic followed and succeeded in convertingmany Ugandans to Christianity. Rallying around

their new faith, two contending political factionsled the country into a brief civil war in 1892,largely over the issue of naming a successor to thethrone. The fighting led the British to impose a pro-tectorate over the country in 1894. Challenged bythe Bunyoro kingdom to the north, the Britishsided with the Buganda, extending both colonialrule and the Bugandan monarchy to the north of thecountry.

The British also utilized the Christianized Bugandaas their administrative agents and security forcethroughout the Muslim and animist areas of thecountry, inflaming ethnic divisions within the coun-try that persist to this day. At the same time, underan agreement signed between the Buganda monarchyand the British government, new forms of land own-ership were instituted. Before the arrival of the Euro-peans, the Buganda monarchy had held all lands intrust for the people, but the new dispensation createdprivate ownership, and much of the land fell into thehands of the Buganda elite. The British also estab-lished an educational system that disproportionatelybenefited the Buganda.

Despite these benefits, it was the Buganda whofirst began to agitate for more power within the colo-nial system and then for independence. In the 1930sand 1940s, Buganda workers and peasants began toorganize unions, leading to demonstrations againstboth British and royal rule and, increasingly, callsfor independence. These demands caused concernamong the leaders of other ethnic groups, who fearedthat an independent Uganda would be largely con-trolled by the Buganda. Indeed, the first two politi-cal parties in the country—the Uganda NationalCongress (UNC), founded in 1952, and the Demo-cratic Party (DP), established two years later—wereBuganda-controlled, though both included membersof other ethnic groups. Thus began a lasting conceitamong the Buganda that the interests of their ethnic

UGANDA: Anti-Amin Struggle, 1971–1979TYPE OF CONFLICT: CoupsPARTICIPANT: Tanzania

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group coincided with the interests of the country atlarge.

The rise of the Buganda independence movementsparked political organizing in the largely non-Bugandanorth of the country. There, Milton Obote helped toorganize the Uganda People’s Union in 1958, whichlater merged with renegades from the UNC to formthe Uganda People’s Congress (UPC). Still, theBuganda were not entirely united. Divided betweenProtestant and Catholic wings, the Buganda splitover the question of whether to secede and form theirown independent country. When the secession planfailed, the opposition Buganda group formed theKabaka Yekka (KY), which sought to ensure the con-tinued presence and power of the royal house within afederated state. To achieve this goal, it united withthe UPC, and together the coalition swept to powerin the pre-independence elections of April 1962,with Obote serving as the new country’s first primeminister.

Obote Regime

The ruling UPC-KY alliance faced a number of ma-jor internal problems during the early years of inde-pendence, most revolving around the question ofcentral versus local government power. Moreover, ag-itation among the Bunyoro to win back two districtslost to the Buganda after the 1892 civil war led to aplebiscite in which the local residents voted to returnthe districts to Bunyoro County in 1964, a decisionignored by the government. Meanwhile, the UPCwas increasing its control over all district councilsand legislatures outside of Buganda. Despite these lo-cal successes, the UPC was facing political problemsin the capital. Its KY partners dropped out of the co-alition, and the UPC grew increasingly divided overeconomic policies, with Obote attempting to nation-alize much of the commercial and industrial sector.

In April 1966, the national assembly approveda motion demanding an investigation into a gold-smuggling operation conducted by two of Obote’s

KEY DATES

1962 Uganda wins its independence from Great Britain, with Milton Obote aspresident.

1966 With the national assembly demanding an investigation into corruptionin the Obote administration, the president declares a state of emer-gency and postpones elections until 1971.

1971 Army second-in-command Idi Amin, one of the figures targeted for cor-ruption investigation in 1966, seizes power while Obote is out of thecountry.

1972 Amin orders all 45,000 Asian residents of Uganda to leave the country;as this group represents much of the business class of the country, theeconomy is devastated as a result; former members of the military,led by former officers David Oyite-Ojok and Yuweri Museveni, form ananti-Amin guerrilla army and invade the country from Tanzania.

1978 To counteract Tanzanian support for the rebels, Amin invades Tanzania.

1979 The Tanzanian army and the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA)invade the country in January; they quickly defeat the demoralizedUgandan army and force Amin into exile in Saudi Arabia; it is estimatedthat between 300,000 and 500,000 persons were killed by Amin’sforces during the eight-year dictatorship.


top officials, one of whom was the army’s second-in-command, Idi Amin. Obote used the tense situationto launch a preemptive coup, arresting a number ofministers, suspending the constitution, and grantinghimself all executive powers. A month later, afterelements of the armed forces loyal to the royal housedemanded autonomy for the Buganda, the rest ofthe army, under Amin’s command, seized the royalpalace—the king had fled the country—and Obotedeclared a state of emergency, postponing electionsuntil 1971.

During these years, Uganda slipped increasinglyinto a state of repressive dictatorship. Relying onAmin’s forces, Obote arrested anyone who challengedhis rule. But Amin was not entirely reliable. A north-erner, he was sympathetic to the rebels in Sudan—related to his own ethnic group—who were fightingfor autonomy. When Obote demanded that Aminstop funneling arms to the Sudanese rebels in 1969,Amin attempted a coup but was forced to flee to abase in his home district. There, he plotted his returnto power, and when Obote left the country on adiplomatic mission in January 1971, Amin seizedpower.

Amin’s Dictatorship

Both the people of Uganda and the international com-munity welcomed the coup, the former because itpromised national unity and the latter because Obotewas seen as too dictatorial. But Amin soon showed histrue colors. An uneducated man who had risen in theranks of the colonial army through his skills as aboxer, Amin immediately purged the army and policeof Obote supporters by massacring them. Suspendingall political activity and most civil rights, Amin dis-solved the national assembly and ruled by fiat. Mili-tary courts were given expanded jurisdiction over allcitizens, and several new security agencies were estab-lished to keep an eye on any possible dissent or chal-lenge to Amin’s rule. Though Amin was alreadyresponsible for hundreds of murders, it was his deci-sion to expel Uganda’s substantial Asian communitythat earned him international condemnation and asevering of diplomatic and commercial relations withBritain, then Uganda’s number-one trading partner.

Like other East African countries, Uganda hadhad a large population of Asians—largely fromIndia—since the turn of the century, when they werebrought in as labor to build the colonial railroads.

Many then moved into small business, succeedingbecause they were often favored by the British andbecause, as a tightly knit community, they providedcapital to one another. In the process, they hadearned a certain degree of resentment from theAfrican community. Uganda had seen anti-Asian ri-ots in the 1940s, but both the British colonial ad-ministration and the Obote regime recognized theIndian community’s importance and so offered a de-gree of protection.

But Amin, unfamiliar with the crucial economicrole they played, accepted the populist notion thatthey were parasites, feeding off the African people.Following his August announcement that all non-citizen Asians—later expanded to all Asians—mustleave his country, troops and police took over busi-nesses and other Asian property, often at gunpoint orfor pennies on the dollar. Harassed and even mur-dered as they tried to leave the country, all but 4,000Asians fled the country, most to Britain. In the hands

President Idi Amin ruled Uganda ruthlessly from 1971 to1979. The armed forces and national police attackedcivilians and looted indiscriminately. An estimated half-million Ugandans died from violence during his eightyears of dictatorship. (Keystone/Getty Images)

of cronies and military officers, the businesses wereplundered and soon disappeared. The Ugandan econ-omy went into a tailspin and would not revive untilthe late 1980s.

Meanwhile, Amin conducted a reign of terrorand folly. He murdered virtually any figure in thecountry who represented a challenge to his rule, in-cluding politicians, religious officials, businessper-sons, and intellectuals. The police and military weregiven carte blanche to attack individuals and lootproperty, which they did with zeal. Despite these ill-gotten gains made possible by Amin, the dictatorfaced several army challenges to his rule, mostly fromethnic groups that he had attacked early in hisregime. When the Anglican archbishop and severalministers criticized the massacres of Langi and Acholipeoples, Amin ordered their assassinations. All in all,it is estimated that some 500,000 Ugandans diedfrom violence during the eight years of dictatorship.But it was Amin’s comically misguided foreign pol-icy ventures that spelled his doom.

In September 1972, former members of Obote’smilitary and security forces—now organized into aguerrilla army under the command of David Oyite-Ojok and Yuweri Museveni, both former militaryofficers—invaded the country from neighboring Tan-zania, intending to overthrow the Amin regime.Amin, supplied with weapons by the Soviet Unionand Libya—for which he had paid with the propertystolen from the exiled Asian community, sent his airforce to bomb Tanzanian towns, provoking Tanzanianpresident Julius Nyerere to sever diplomatic relationsand begin organizing a coalition of East Africanheads of state to oppose Amin. Amin also managedto offend the United States by making scandalouscharges against President Jimmy Carter and threat-ening the American ambassador and his family. TheUnited States cut off relations with Uganda as well.

Uganda’s diplomatic isolation soon had detri-mental effects on its economy. Much of the commer-cial and industrial sector was in ruins. Most of thecommercial agricultural plantations had closed down.What little international trade Uganda still engagedin was mostly conducted by smugglers. Unemploy-ment in the cities skyrocketed, and people began togrow hungry in a country that once had been a foodexporter. Having purged his government of any andall competent administrators, Amin now surroundedhimself with sycophants who catered to his everyparanoid fantasy. His regime soon reached new levels

of depravity as Amin took personal charge of the tor-ture and murder of supposed opponents, going so faras to store their body parts in huge refrigerators in hiscompound, where he would examine them and showthem off to visitors.

The morass the country was sinking into was ev-ident even to formerly loyal officers in the military.Soon Amin’s many enemies were hatching clandes-tine plots to overthrow him; popular unrest grew. Inresponse, Amin cooked up a desperate and fantasti-cal plan to divert the army and public’s attentionfrom the troubles he had inflicted on the country. InOctober 1978, Amin launched an invasion of Tanza-nia, with the aim of seizing the Kagera area, whichwould give landlocked Uganda access to the IndianOcean. The invasion was easily turned back by theTanzanian army, but Tanzanian president Nyererewas infuriated. He came to the conclusion that Aminhad to go.

Lining up his fellow East African heads of stateand encouraging Ugandan exiles to form a unitedanti-Amin front, Nyerere made his move in January1979. Meeting little resistance from the demoralizedUgandan army and their 1,500 Libyan allies, the Tan-zanian army and the new Uganda National LiberationArmy (UNLA) quickly rolled across the country andcaptured the capital, Kampala, in April. Amin fledthe country for Saudi Arabia, where he lived until hisdeath in 2003.

Aftermath

Even before Kampala was taken, the political partiesof the early years of independence began to organizean interim government. In early March, they organizeda conference, establishing a new political party—theUganda National Liberation Front (UNLF)—and athirty-member national consultative committee toserve as a temporary legislature. Obote, respondingto Nyerere’s suggestion that he would antagonizedelegates, agreed not to participate, and a former aca-demic named Yusufu Lule was picked to run the na-tional executive committee and serve as presidentuntil general elections could be held. After attempt-ing to reorganize the executive committee, however,the consultative committee ousted Lule in favor offormer attorney general Godfrey Binaisa.

Meanwhile, post-Amin Uganda was descendinginto anarchy. Relations between Tanzanian soldiersand guerrillas of the UNLA deteriorated as the latter

Uganda: Anti-Amin Struggle, 1971–1979 313


began to fight amongst themselves along ethniclines, often at the instigation of the many untrainedrecruits brought into the army during its reconquestof Uganda. Moreover, many of the new troops beganto engage in the same kind of looting of property andviolence against civilians that marked the Aminregime. In late 1979, Obote convinced Binaisa to dis-miss both Oyite-Ojok and Museveni from theirrespective positions of chief of staff and defense min-ister, resulting in an army mutiny that placed the twoback in power.

A year later, in December 1980, the promisedgeneral elections were held, with all of the old partiesparticipating. While the Democratic Party was pre-vented from registering its candidates because ofsupposed technical violations of the electoral law,the Uganda People’s Conference (Obote’s old party)split into a mainstream faction, headed by Obote,and a radical group under Museveni. In the end, themainstream UPC faction swept the elections, return-

ing Obote to the presidency after some nine years inexile.

James Ciment

See also: Coups; Uganda: Civil Conflict Since 1980.

BibliographyHansen, Holger Bernt, and Michael Twaddle, eds. Uganda

Now: Between Decay and Development. Athens: Ohio Univer-sity Press, 1988.

Kasfir, Nelson. The Shrinking Political Arena: Participation andEthnicity in African Politics, with a Case Study of Uganda.Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

Kyemba, Henry. A State of Blood: The Inside Story of Idi Amin.New York: Ace Books, 1977.

Mamdani, Mahmood. Politics and Class Formation in Uganda.New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976.

Mazrui, Ali Al’Amin. Soldiers and Kinsmen in Uganda: TheMaking of a Military Ethnocracy. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage,1975.

Mittelman, James H. Ideology and Politics in Uganda: FromObote to Amin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975.

315

After former dictator Milton Obote was elected itspresident in 1980, Uganda settled into several yearsof tension and low-level violence. The former dicta-tor, Idi Amin, who had been ousted from power byUgandan rebels and the Tanzanian army in 1979, hadleft a legacy of corruption and rule by terror that wasdifficult to eradicate. Obote’s security forces, thoughnot as extensive or violent as those under Amin, en-gaged in many of the same oppressive and destructivetactics, acting as a law unto themselves.

Meanwhile, several small guerrilla groups opposedObote and his United People’s Congress (UPC). Thegroups included the Uganda National Rescue Front(UNRF), former Amin supporters operating out of theformer dictator’s home district in the west; the Ugan-dan Freedom Movement (UFM); and the National Re-sistance Army (NRA), led by former defense ministerand radical UPC politician Yuweri Museveni, operat-ing out of the Luwero Triangle north of the capital.

Obote was a northerner whose coalition in-cluded southern Buganda people (precolonial rulersof Uganda) in addition to the Acholi and Langi ofthe north. He was disliked by the radical and disaf-fected Buganda. The opposition also won the supportof the Banyarwanda Tutsi, exiles from Rwanda whowere fleeing from an anti-Tutsi Hutu government.To counter the increasingly powerful NRA, Oboteand his Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA)launched massive raids on Luwero. The attacks suc-ceeded in driving tens of thousands of civilians intorefugee camps; thousands of others became NRAsupporters.

Obote also faced serious economic problems. Af-ter spending the International Monetary Fund loansit received upon coming to power in 1980, the gov-ernment found itself unable to provide the subsidiesfor basic food and fuel. Further loans were not forth-coming because investigations conducted by the U.S.Congress and Amnesty International in 1984 foundthe UPC government guilty of gross violations of hu-man rights and the deaths of tens of thousands ofUgandan citizens. While not as flamboyant as Amin,Obote was proving himself a dictator of the worstkind.

Museveni Takes Power

Meanwhile, ethnic divisions in the army were comingto a head. In 1985, the two largest groups—theAcholi and the Langi—began to fire upon each otherwithin the Kampala barracks. The Acholi left thebarracks and marched northward, where they joinedforces with the UNRF, even though their traditionalrivals, the West Nile people, dominated the latter.Together, the two forces returned to Kampala, forc-ing Obote to flee to Kenya and later to Zambia. Buteven as the new Acholi-dominated government,headed by Tito Okello, tried to assert its control over

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the country, it faced the same challenge that Obotehad—the NRA, which had expanded its territory toinclude much of the south and west of the country.

At the end of 1985, the Okello government agreedto meet with Museveni, head of the NRA, to arrange acease-fire and a possible power-sharing arrangement.In fact, Okello was using the talks as a cover fordisarming his West Nile allies, who were threateninga coup d’état. The West Nile people fled to theirhomeland in the northwest, destroying everything intheir path. Museveni, realizing that the power-sharingagreement with Okello was meaningless, broke off thetalks and returned to the NRA in the southwest toplan an offensive to take the capital. He attacked anddrove Okello out of power in January 1986.

Museveni invited civilians into his governmentand promised an administration of national reconcili-

ation. He established a commission to investigatethe abuses of the Amin, Obote, and Okello regimes;the report they issued was horrifying. As many as800,000 Ugandans had been killed by the violencethat had torn apart the country since Obote’s originalcoup in 1966. Museveni dismissed 2,500 police offi-cers who were suspected of committing human rightsviolations and created a nationwide network of resis-tance committees, made up of local civilians. Thecommittees were charged with preventing officialabuses and corruption and protecting villages againstguerrilla and bandit attacks.

Continuing Violence

Guerilla threats were especially challenging in theearly years of the Museveni administration. Various

KEY DATES

1979 Dictator Idi Amin is overthrown in an invasion by the TanzanianArmy and guerrillas of the Uganda National Liberation Army(UNLA).

1980 Former dictator Milton Obote is elected president; several fac-tions of parties defeated in the election form small guerrillagroups in opposition to the ruling Uganda People’s Congress(UPC).

1985 Ethnic divisions within the national army lead to violence in theKampala barracks; Obote is overthrown in a military coup.

1986 Yuweri Museveni, head of the National Resistance Army (NRA)guerrilla organization, seizes power.

1991 Museveni dispatches the NRA to destroy various guerrilla forcesin the north of the country.

1994 Uganda-based Tutsi rebels invade neighboring Rwanda and endthe Hutu genocide of Tutsi in that country.

1996 Museveni is overwhelmingly elected president.

1999 Uganda and Sudan sign an agreement whereby each side prom-ises to stop aiding or providing sanctuary for rebel movementsin the other country.

2003–2004 The Ugandan army conducts a major offensive against rebelsof the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), but the group’s attackson refugee camps continue.

guerrilla armies—including loyalists of the formerAmin and Obote regimes—were wreaking havocthroughout the north of the country. Often nothingmore than lawless bands, they looted property, rapedwomen, and forced peasants to work for them. Oftenthey assassinated officials, teachers, and anyone elsethey perceived as working for the Museveni govern-ment. Among the strangest of these groups was theHoly Spirit Movement, led by a charismatic cultleader named Alice Lakwena and manned by Acholipeasants. Virtually unarmed, they attacked the NRAwith machetes and spears. Not surprisingly, theywere easily overcome by the army, which killed sev-eral thousand. The survivors fled to neighboringKenya, where they organized themselves as the Lord’sResistance Army (LRA).

A more serious challenge were the remnants ofthe antigovernment guerrillas operating in the northand northwest of the country. In April 1991, theNRA launched a sweep of the area, hoping to wipeout the guerrilla armies. By July, the army reportedhaving killed 1,500 and arresting 1,000 more,though human rights organizations cited the armyfor abuses against civilians. Though facing guerrillachallenges, as well as several coup plots within hisown army, Museveni was also making conciliatorygestures. To appease the opposition, he offered cabi-net positions and other favors. To gain support fromthe international community, he formally invited theAsian Ugandans—brutally expelled by Amin in1972—to come back to Uganda and, where possible,recoup the property that had been seized from them.

Gradually Museveni introduced more stabilityand prosperity than Uganda had seen since the earlyyears of independence. Though he claimed that po-litical parties antagonize ethnic divisions, he slowlyallowed the introduction of opposition parties. Hisefforts were rewarded by the Ugandan people, whoelected him president in 1996 with nearly three-quarters of the vote, and by the international commu-nity. International lending agencies, governments,and nongovernmental organizations, pleased by theprogress he had made in reestablishing a degree ofdemocracy and reviving the economy, offered finan-cial and other forms of help. Less satisfactory tooutsiders—particularly the French—was the supporthe offered the Banyarwanda Tutsi exiles from Rwandain their attacks on the French-supported Hutu gov-ernment there in the 1980s. In 1994, however, Mu-seveni helped the Tutsi launch the invasion that

helped end the slaughter of Tutsis by Hutu forces.In 1997, the Museveni government supported themilitary campaign of Laurent Kabila in the Congo tooust Mobutu Sese Seko from power. The next year,Museveni supported the campaign to remove Kabilahimself.

One remaining challenge for the Museveni govern-ment was the Lord’s Resistance Army. Having movedfrom Kenya to southern Sudan, it reputedly receivedarms and assistance from the Islamist governmentthere. The Sudanese were said to provide the assistanceto counter Uganda’s supposed support of black Christ-ian rebels in Sudan. Whatever the truth of these asser-tions, the LRA mounted major attacks on villages innorthwestern Uganda during 1995 and 1996, killing,torturing, raping, and abducting civilians (for trainingas guerrilla fighters), while also virtually enslaving nu-merous children. The LRA was mystical and secretive,claiming to seek the establishment of a governmentfounded on the Bible’s Ten Commandments, yet itlacked any real political agenda. It proved difficult tonegotiate with and difficult to eradicate by force.While the Ugandan army conducted extensive sweepsof the northwest, the LRA continued to launch attackson civilians and military outposts. Some 10,000 peoplewere killed in the fighting, and the unrest in the regionled to food shortages among a population of some230,000 Ugandan refugees.

In 1999, Uganda and Sudan signed an agreementby which Sudan agreed to stop funding the LRA andUganda agreed to end support for the Sudan People’sLiberation Army (SPLA). The agreement reduced thelevel of LRA attacks, but the group remained a threatto Ugandan civilians in the north and west. In early2003, there was hope that peace talks would resume.Later that year, Ugandan troops conduced anothermassive roundup of LRA rebels, resulting in the res-cue of over 7,000 abductees and the killing or arrestof 1,700 rebels, according to the Ugandan DefenseMinistry. These intermittent roundups were setbacksfor future LRA terror campaigns, but the group con-tinued its attacks. It also seems likely that the LRAcontinues to receive supplies and assistance fromgroups outside Uganda.

Uganda in the Twenty-firstCentur y

By the early 2000s, Uganda had 27 million inhabi-tants. Approximately one-third were Catholic, another

Uganda: Civi l Confl ict Since 19 8 0 317


third Protestant, and the balance split nearly evenlybetween Muslims and those holding indigenous be-liefs. The Buganda people remained the largest ethnicgroup, representing approximately 17 percent of thepopulation; the remaining population representedmore than two dozen ethnic groups. With so manyethnic groups, one alone often controls the govern-ment, security organizations, and much of the econ-omy. This is often unacceptable to other ethnic groupsand leads to conflict along ethnic lines. When theserivalries persist, they pose a challenge to peace andstability in the region. Often conflicts spill over intoneighboring countries, since larger ethnic groups com-monly straddle borders.

Thus, the continuing challenge for Uganda con-tinued to be addressing the diversity and inequalitybetween different ethnic groups. To complicate mat-ters, the Museveni government was often accused ofnepotism and corruption. Ministers were censored inParliament on charges of influence peddling and cor-ruption. The World Bank mission to Uganda in 1998revealed widespread secrecy, insider dealings, andcorruption, even at the highest levels of government.Cases of large-scale embezzlement were common, in-cluding the theft of donor funds disbursed to theministries of health and education and to the Ugan-dan Electoral Commission.

Despite Uganda’s vast natural resources, its peopleremained in the grip of poverty, squalor, and destitu-tion. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan frequentlylashed out at corrupt African leaders, noting that theUN Security Council spends the majority of its timeworking on issues related to Africa. In Uganda, thePolitical Organizations Bill, passed by Parliament in2001, aimed to remove restrictions on political par-

ties and open up more space for new reform-mindedmovements. President Museveni’s government op-posed these measures and further consolidated itsposition. In the March 2001 presidential election,Museveni captured 69.3 percent of the vote, and hisopponent, Colonel Kizza Besigye, went into self-imposed exile. Besigye’s wife, Winnie Byanyima, anoutspoken opposition member of Parliament, re-mained in her government post during the elections,but soon afterward she was dismissed for speaking outagainst government corruption. Later she was chargedwith illegally possessing a handgun.

Although additional political reforms aimed atreducing ethnic conflict were being considered by aConstitutional Review Commission (CRC), the gov-ernment remained opposed to empowering real oppo-sition parties. In general, the Museveni era broughtsome stability and economic improvement to thecountry. As long as effective political opposition is for-bidden, however, the situation in Uganda will remaintense.

James Ciment and Luke Nichter

See also: Ethnic and Religious Conflicts; Sudan: Civil War inSouth, 1955–1972; 1983–2005; Uganda: Anti-Amin Strug-gle, 1971–1979.

BibliographyAyittey, George B.N. Africa Unchained: The Blueprint for

Africa’s Future. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005.Bastian, Sunil, and Robin Luckham, eds. Can Democracy Be

Designed? The Politics of Institutional Choice in Conflict-TornSocieties. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003.

Hansen, Bernt Holder, and Michael Twaddle, eds. From Chaosto Order: The Politics of Constitutionmaking in Uganda. Lon-don: J. Currey, 1995.

WESTERN SAHARA: Polisario-MoroccanWar, 1975–1991TYPE OF CONFLICT: Anticolonialism; Invasions and Border DisputesPARTICIPANTS: Morocco; Mauritania

319

Western Sahara (formerly Spanish Sahara) is located atthe extreme western edge of the Sahara Desert. One ofthe harshest environments on earth, it averages onlyabout two inches of rain per year. Much of its territoryis gravel desert with sparse vegetation. It borders Mo-rocco in the north, Algeria in the northeast, and Mau-ritania to the south and east. Its long Atlantic coastlineis rocky, lined with sandbars, and largely bereft of nat-ural harbors. Along the coast is a narrow belt of sanddunes about ten to twenty miles wide. Much of the in-terior is windswept gravel plains.

The Western Sahara has two major regions. Inthe north is the Saguia El-Hamra region of the Saguia

El-Hamra (the “Red River”) valley. It is the only im-portant river in the country, but it flows only in thewet season. Western Sahara’s southern region is knownas the Río de Oro.

From time immemorial, the territory of the West-ern Sahara has been inhabited by nomadic ethnicgroups. Because of the harshness of the desert climate,the population is thin and widely dispersed over some100,000 square miles of territory. The native peopleare Arabs, Berbers, Tuaregs, Reguibat, Delim, andIzarguen. The people today are collectively referred toas Saharawis. While all are Muslim and under leaderswho claim descent from the prophet Muhammad, nosupratribal government had ever established authorityin the region, though an elaborate caste system ratessome groups as higher in status than others. Thesecastes contain various groups of nomads within them,each group related by complicated kinship ties to aruling family. The tribes remain independent of eachother and engage in generations-long blood feuds.


The Spanish established their first settlement in theregion at Río de Oro Bay in 1884 but were unable topacify the interior of the region until the 1930s. Aslate as the early 1950s, the Spanish presence was min-imal: a few villages and several hundred settlers. Butthe discovery of vast phosphate deposits—critical inthe production of chemical fertilizers—in the latteryears of the decade changed all that. In 1962, theSpanish established their first major phosphate-pro-cessing plant in the Western Sahara, and by the early1970s, the territory had become the sixth largest pro-ducer of the mineral in the world. Within these sameyears, some 20,000 Spanish workers and administratorssettled in the region.

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These developments, along with several pro-longed droughts, encouraged thousands of Saharawisto settle on the outskirts of Spanish settlements inthe 1960s, where they were given some access toeducation and paid employment. By 1974, roughlyhalf the population was living in towns. The Span-ish also offered limited self-rule in a territorialassembly.

While Spain occupied the Western Sahara from1884 to 1975, two neighboring African countries—Morocco to the north and Mauritania to the east and

south—have had claims on the territory since theirown independence. Morocco’s independence fromFrance in 1958 inspired the first anticolonial guer-rilla movement in Western Sahara, known as the Sa-harawi wing of Morocco’s Army of Liberation. Butthis force was quickly subdued by a Spanish-Frenchexpeditionary force. With the support of Algeria—Morocco’s chief rival for political dominance innorthwestern Africa—Mauritania claimed the rightto rule through an ethnic affinity with the Saharawipeople.

KEY DATES

1884 Spain takes over control of the region that will become the West-ern Sahara.

1958 Numerous Saharawis, or people of the Western Sahara, areforced to flee to Morocco after their uprising against Spanish ruleis put down.

1973 Saharawi nationalists, exiled in Morocco, form the Polisario Frontto fight for Western Saharan independence from Spain.

1974 Spain announces it will offer the Saharawi a referendum on inde-pendence in 1975.

1975 Citing prior claims to the mineral-rich territory, Morocco andMauritania launch an invasion of the Western Sahara; in re-sponse to the invasion, the Polisario announces the formation ofthe Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic and the formation of theSaharawi Popular Liberation Army (SPLA).

1978 Backed by Algeria, guerrillas of the SPLA launch an invasion ofMauritania, forcing that country to give up its claims to territoryin the Western Sahara.

1978–1982 The SPLA establishes control over 90 percent of the territory ofthe Western Sahara.

1991 UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar negotiates a cease-fire between the SPLA and Morocco, but the fighting continues.

2000 Talks are held between Polisario and Morocco in London andBerlin.

2003 International energy corporations begin exploring for oil in theWestern Sahara.

2005 The Algerian president declares that the Western Sahara conflictcan only be resolved through the mediation of the UN.

Western Sahara: Polisario-Moroccan War, 1975–19 91 321

Meanwhile, both the United Nations and theOrganization of African Unity (OAU) began push-ing for self-determination of the Saharawi nation inthe mid-1960s. Spain agreed, but threw up delay af-ter delay, arguing that the nomadic nature of the in-habitants made self-government difficult to establish.Finally, in August 1974, as the Francisco Francoregime entered its final, senescent days, Madrid an-nounced it would offer the Saharawi a referendumon independence sometime during the first half of1975. To maintain its control over the mineral re-sources of the territory, Spain began grooming acompliant new leader for Western Sahara, Kahli-henna Ould Rachid and his Partido de la UniónNacional Saharaui (PUNS). The announcement an-gered Morocco’s King Hassan, who believed he hada tacit understanding with the Spanish that the ter-ritory would be turned over to his governmentrather than being given independence. His threatsforced Spain to announce yet another delay in thereferendum.

Saharawi Nationalism

Developing a national consciousness out of a collec-tion of dispersed and mutually antagonistic no-madic groups was not an easy task. Two factors,however, were key. First, Spain and Morocco—bothhoping to develop a pliable local elite who couldrun the territory for them—permitted hundreds ofchildren of tribal leaders to receive an education atschools and universities in the two countries. Manymore Saharawis, forced to migrate to Morocco afterthe failed uprising of 1958, also became educated.But, as is often the case, these educated elites cameto serve as the core of a Saharawi nationalistmovement.

While studying in Morocco, a group of Saharawistudents began organizing around a refugee studentnamed El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed. At first, they alliedthemselves with Moroccan opposition parties, hopingthey could pressure the king to push for indepen-dence for the Western Sahara. But after anti-Spanish

Commandos of the Polisario Front independence group in Western Sahara scramble to take positions near the front linewith Morocco in June 1988. As of the mid-2000s, the conflict over sovereignty defied resolution. (AFP/Getty Images)

demonstrations were broken up by Moroccan police,Sayed and other Saharawi leaders decided that thestruggle had to be based in the Western Sahara. InMay 1973, these leaders organized the Polisario Front(a Spanish acronym for the Popular Liberation of Sa-hara and Río de Oro) on the border of Western Saharaand Mauritania.

The second event contributing to a developmentof a Saharawi nationalism, one that permeated themasses as well as the elites, was the Mauritanian-Moroccan invasion of 1975. While the former coun-try merely sent in troops to occupy a strip along itsnorthern border with Western Sahara, Moroccolaunched its so-called Green March, whereby some350,000 civilians marched across the sands in a“peaceful” occupation, with the clear indication thatMorocco was there to stay. Pressured by this stunt,Spain negotiated with Hassan. Then, having workedout a deal to retain economic rights, Madrid reverseditself in November 1975, allowing troops from Mo-rocco and Mauritania to occupy the Western Saharaupon its departure.

In response to the occupation, the Polisario de-clared the establishment of the Saharawi Arab Demo-cratic Republic (SADR) and launched the SaharawiPopular Liberation Army (SPLA). Armed by its Al-gerian allies, the SPLA launched an invasion of Mau-ritania, quickly overwhelming that country’s tinymilitary and forcing its government in Nouakchottto give up its claims on Western Sahara and pull outits remaining troops in 1978.

War Between the Polisario and Morocco

Morocco—with one of the largest and most modernarmies in northern Africa—proved much harder todislodge. Still, from 1978 to 1982, the SPLA wasable to establish control over about nine-tenths ofthe territory of Western Sahara, launch guerrillaattacks that paralyzed the phosphate mining indus-try, and drive Moroccan troops from most of theirposts. In response, Morocco decided to change tac-tics. It began construction of huge defensive sandberms—augmented by minefields, heavy armaments,and electronic sensing equipment—around muchof the settled and economically crucial parts of theterritory.

The strategy worked, after a fashion. The SPLAfound it extremely difficult to establish permanent

control over territories inside these defenses, and thephosphate industry not only returned to productionbut actually expanded under Moroccan protection.At the same time, the cost of these defenses—whichinclude some 150,000 troops—is staggering, offset-ting much of the profits from the mining industry.Indeed, the conflict settled into a war of attritionthrough much of the 1980s. The Polisario was unableto stop the mining operations or drive the Moroccansout, but it continued to breach the defenses almost atwill, inflicting heavy casualties on Moroccan units.Meanwhile, the SADR supplemented its battlefieldefforts in the diplomatic arena, where it won therecognition of most African states as well as twenty-five more in the rest of the world.

Negotiations and Elections

By the late 1980s, however, both sides were indicat-ing that they might be willing to find a negotiatedsolution. The Moroccans were tired of the war, and,because of increased instability in Algeria, the Polis-ario has lost much of the support it received from itsmain ally. In 1988 and again in 1991, UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar worked to win anagreement from both sides, calling for the gradualwithdrawal of Moroccan troops and the demobiliza-tion of SPLA fighters under UN auspices. Thesemoves would precede a referendum in which the resi-dents of the territory would be offered three choices:continued Moroccan rule, full independence, or a com-promise federated status with Morocco. Despite spo-radic fighting and violations of the cease-fire arrangedin 1991, progress toward a peaceful settlement hasproceeded.

The main sticking point, however, was the elec-tion or, more specifically, registration for the election.While the UN mission in the territory based thevoter rolls on a 1974 Spanish census, Morocco hascontinued to claim that some 400,000 people areeligible to vote, more than half of whom have beenliving in Morocco for over two decades. The Polisario,knowing that many of these refugees will vote for con-tinued Moroccan sovereignty, insists on a smaller andtighter registration list.

Events Since 2000

The official Arabic name for Western Sahara used by thePolisario is al-Jumhuriya as-Sahrawiya ad-Dimuqratiya


al-’Arabiya (Democratic Arab Republic of Sahara). In2000 talks were held in London and Berlin betweenthe Polisario and Morocco, in response to UN SecurityCouncil Resolution 1309. Both Morocco and thePolisario were intransigent, however, and no progresswas made in resolving the conflict.

Tension mounted, with a referendum on indepen-dence delayed as a result. In April 2001 Morocco pro-posed the “Third Option,” a ten-year transition periodfor studying a way to implement a self-determinationreferendum. Mohamed Abdelaziz, the leader of thePolisario, renewed its declaration that the conflictcould only be resolved by respecting the right of theSaharawi to self-determination.

In recent decades, the leadership of the Polisariohas become more skilled at diplomacy and public re-lations, as they have sought to present their case in agrowing number of public forums. The PolisarioFront proposed its own peace plan (June 4, 2001),which was essentially a renewal of its call for a refer-endum leading to independence for Western Sahara.It accepted the UN secretary-general’s special envoy,former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, as a medi-ator, but his efforts produced little in the way ofagreement.

In 2002, both the Organization for African Unity(now the African Union) and Spain renewed their po-sitions that the solution to the conflict lay in self-determination. However, in November the king ofMorocco, Mohamed VI, rejected the United NationsSettlement Plan for Western Sahara. The king saidthat autonomy was possible but not independence.France supported Morocco in this position.

In 2003 and 2004, Kerr-McGee and other oil com-panies began exploring Western Sahara for oil, but thedeal was opposed by a coalition of more than twenty

activist groups spread across four continents. Activistsin Norway were able to pressure the state-owned oilcompany to dissolve its ties with Kerr-McGree. Thesegroups sided with Western Sahara, viewing the Mo-roccan occupation as illegal; thus, any oil deals Mo-rocco makes for exploration in Western Sahara arealso illegal.

The struggle continued in 2005, with the Polis-ario charging Morocco with engaging in humanrights abuses because of harsh treatment of its sup-porters at the hands of Moroccan police. Amnesty In-ternational also accused Morocco of mistreating civilsociety activists who were working for Western Saha-ran independence.

As of the mid-2000s, no resolution of the conflictappeared imminent. Because of the very small Sa-harawi population, the weight of numbers and ofpower seemed to favor Morocco in the long term.

James Ciment and Andrew J. Waskey

See also: People’s Wars; Invasions and Border Disputes; Mauri-tania: Coups Since 1978.

BibliographyHodges, Tony. Western Sahara: The Roots of a Desert War. West-

port, CT: L. Hill, 1983.Jensen, Erik. Western Sahara: Anatomy of a Stalemate. Boulder,

CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004.Kamil, Leo. Fueling the Fire: U.S. Policy and the Western Sahara

Conflict. Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1987.Shelly, Toby. Endgame in the Western Sahara: What Future for

Africa’s Last Colony? New York: Zed Books, 2004.Thobhani, Akbarali. Western Sahara Since 1975 Under Moroc-

can Administration: Social, Economic and Political Transforma-tion. Lewiston, NY: Lampeter, 2002.

Volman, Daniel, and Yahia Zoubir, eds. International Dimen-sions of the Western Sahara Conflict. Westport, CT: Praeger,1993.

Western Sahara: Polisario-Moroccan War, 1975–19 91 323

ZIMBABWE: Struggle for Majority Rule,1965–1980TYPE OF CONFLICT: Anticolonialism

324

Until the arrival of British and Boer settlers in thelate nineteenth century, the peoples of Zimbabwe hadlittle contact with the outside world, though theyconducted trade with the coastal settlements on theIndian Ocean, first with the Arabs and then, after the1500s, with the Portuguese. Indeed, Portuguese set-tlement of coastal southwest and southeast SouthAfrica (now Angola and Mozambique, respectively)led to the creation of a mixed caste of Afro-Portugueseasimilados, who acted as middlemen between thecattle-raising kingdoms of highland Zimbabwe andport cities on the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. But, byand large, European settlement in southern Africa re-mained confined to a few coastal settlements and theCape Colony of Boers, descendants of early Dutch set-tlers, until the late nineteenth century.

Europeans largely stayed out for several reasons.First, the climate along the coasts was not particu-larly conducive to European settlement, with malariataking its toll on humans and the tsetse fly makinglivestock raising impossible. Moreover, the presenceof well-organized and well-defended African king-doms in the region discouraged all but the most in-trepid explorers. Yet, early explorers like DavidLivingstone and Henry Stanley did penetrate the re-gion, reporting that the interior of southern Africawas much different from the coasts, with the high-lands offering a benign climate free of the malarialmosquito and the tsetse fly.

White Sett lement

The most dramatic event in modern southern Africanhistory, however, had to do with a different kind offinding. The discoveries first of diamonds and thenof gold in the 1870s and 1880s in the Transvaal re-gion of South Africa vastly accelerated settlementsouth of the Limpopo River, which now divides

The first civilizations in what is now Zimbabwe dateback roughly a thousand years to the building of thestone city of Great Zimbabwe. Under the authority oftheir kings, the people of Zimbabwe engaged in ironmaking, cattle raising, and trade that extended toboth the southwestern and southeastern coasts ofAfrica. By the second half of the fifteenth century,Great Zimbabwe had been abruptly abandoned,probably because of climatic change; long-lastingdroughts are a frequent occurrence in the region.Great Zimbabwe’s extensive territories were dividedbetween several different civilizations, including theMutapa, Ndebele, and Torwa kingdoms, the lattergiving way to the Rozwi dynasty around 1700. TheMutapa, Ndebele, and Rozwi kingdoms continueduntil well into the nineteenth century and the arrivalof large numbers of white settlers from South Africa.The predominant ethnic groups during this periodand down to the present are the Shona, Ndebele, andTonga.

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Zimbabwe: Struggle for Majority Rule, 19 65–19 8 0 325

South Africa and Zimbabwe. As mining concessionhunters poured into Ndebele lands, the British highcommissioner for the Cape colony declared what isnow present-day Zimbabwe a British sphere of in-fluence.

In 1888, Cecil Rhodes, organizer of the De Beersdiamond conglomerate and future prime minister ofthe Cape, sent his agents to the Ndebele king to se-cure exclusive mining rights for his British SouthAfrica Company. At the same time, he received aroyal charter to administer a vast area north of theLimpopo, later divided into Northern and SouthernRhodesia (which ultimately became Zambia andZimbabwe). Local rulers agreed to allow this ad-ministration, as long as it applied largely to non-Africans.

In 1890, Rhodes sent a “pioneer column” intoShona territory. Three years later, he provoked andwon a war against the Ndebele. But when the initialgoal of discovering more gold deposits failed, thesettlers were granted extensive farmlands, which soonpassed into the hands of speculators. A combined

Ndebele-Shona revolt in 1896, brutally put down bythe British, represented the last major African chal-lenge to British rule until after World War II.

In the meantime, white colonists continued topour into the colony as news spread of its agriculturalpotential and benign climate. In 1923, the Britishgovernment took over administration of what was nowreferred to as Southern Rhodesia from Rhodes’s BritishSouth Africa Company, allowing white settlers a largemargin of autonomous rule, but virtually no politicalpower to blacks. In 1930, the foundations of SouthernRhodesia’s segregated and white-supremacist societywere laid with the passage of the Land Apportion-ments Act. Under this law, the colony was divided intotwo territories, one set aside for each race. The territoryfor whites was far larger and more fertile than the onefor blacks. Statutes were also passed that restrictedblack access to education, jobs, and agricultural com-merce, so that they could not compete with whiteworkers and farmers. Like South Africa, Rhodesia en-acted pass laws, which limited blacks to working asmigrant laborers in the white areas.

KEY DATES

1963 Divisions within the African nationalist opposition to colonial rule leadto the formation of two competing black resistance groups, the Zim-babwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) and the Zimbabwe African Na-tional Union (ZANU).

1964 Britain grants independence to Zambia, the former Northern Rhodesia.

1965 Fearing Britain will turn over power to the black majority, the minoritywhite population of Rhodesia (formerly Southern Rhodesia) unilaterallydeclares the country independent, with themselves in power.

1974 The victory of black nationalists over Portuguese colonists in neighbor-ing Mozambique gives a major boost to ZANU forces, which establishbases there.

1976 ZANU and ZAPU form an uneasy alliance, leading to intensification ofthe struggle against the white minority regime.

1979 Negotiations between the white minority regime and ZANU/ZAPU rep-resentatives lead to a cease-fire and agreement for nonracial nationalelections to be held in 1980.

1980 Nonracial elections lead to the victory of ZANU leader Robert Mugabeas president of the newly renamed Zimbabwe.

The period immediately following World War IIrepresented a time of great economic growth in Rhode-sia and renewed black agitation. By 1960, Rhodesia’spopulation of 200,000 whites and 4,000,000 blackswas becoming increasingly urbanized, as the colonydeveloped an industrial economy second on thecontinent only to South Africa. Needing a better-trained workforce, the government expanded edu-cational opportunities for blacks. But the economicprosperity was very unequally shared, producinga wave of strikes and rural protests throughoutthe late 1950s and early 1960s, just at the timeother sub-Saharan countries were winning theirindependence.

The British responded with a plan to create aCentral African Federation out of what is now Zim-babwe, Zambia, and Malawi, in which both raceswould govern equally. But the two latter countries,which had never been heavily settled by whites, re-jected the plan, forcing London to break up the feder-ation and grant Malawi and Zambia independence in1964. The move terrified the white settlers in Rhode-sia, who feared they would be handed over to a blackgovernment.

Under the white-supremacist Rhodesian Frontparty, the colonists demanded independence fromBritain under a minority-rule constitution. WhenBritain refused, the Front elected the intransigentIan Smith as prime minister. In November 1965,Smith and the Front carried out their long-threatenedUniversal Declaration of Independence from Britain.Though shunned by the international community,Rhodesia prospered over the next decade, protectedby the white minority regime in South Africa and bythe Portuguese presence in Mozambique.

Struggle for Majority Rule

During the ferment of the late 1950s, several majorblack political organizations demanding majorityrule were formed in Rhodesia. Largely confined tourban areas, they were infiltrated by security agentsof the white colonial regime. In 1963, the Africannationalist opposition experienced internal divi-sions, which led to the formation of two competingorganizations: the Zimbabwe African People’s Union(ZAPU) and the Zimbabwe African National Union(ZANU). The former, led by Joshua Nkomo andpopular among the Ndebele people, was the moreconservative of the two organizations, advocating a

power-sharing relationship with whites in the coun-try. Based in Zambia, it received assistance from theSoviet Union and several East European countriesand launched guerrilla raids inside Rhodesia, hopingto spark a confrontation between the black majoritystates in the region and Rhodesia and force the latterto accept a power-sharing agreement.

ZANU was the more radical organization, de-manding black majority rule for Zimbabwe. Headedfirst by the Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole and, after1975, by Robert Mugabe, ZANU’s strength lay inthe Shona community of eastern Zimbabwe. It oper-ated from bases inside Portuguese Mozambique inzones controlled by its ally, the Mozambique Libera-tion Front (known by its Portuguese abbreviation,Frelimo). ZANU received aid from China in its at-tempts to infiltrate Rhodesia and mobilize the poorblacks against the white regime. ZANU was im-mensely bolstered in 1974, when Mozambiquebecame independent, and Frelimo took power the fol-lowing year.

Indeed, the independence of Mozambique underthe radical Frelimo represented a watershed in thehistory of the Zimbabwe struggle. Under Portugueserule, Mozambique had largely provided convenientports for shipment of Rhodesian goods and had ig-nored international pressure to close the ports andrail lines to isolate Rhodesia. Mozambique’s colonialmilitary forces had worked closely with those inRhodesia against both Frelimo and ZANU guerril-las. The new Frelimo government, on the other hand,imposed the full weight of economic sanctionsagainst the white minority government in Rhodesiaand gave its full support to the ZANU guerrillas.In response, the Rhodesian Central IntelligenceOrganization created the Mozambique National Re-sistance (Renamo) to destabilize the Frelimo govern-ment with the help of disaffected Mozambicans(including many of Portuguese descent). (Renamowould develop into one of the most destructive andvicious guerrilla movements in all of Africa andwould outlast the white minority government inRhodesia that had created it.)

Still, efforts were made to find a negotiated set-tlement in the mid-1970s. Fearful of the rise of pro-Communist regimes in southern Africa, both theUnited States and Britain hoped to prevent the radi-cal forces of ZANU from taking over in Rhodesia.The white regime in South Africa, too, became a closeally of the Rhodesian government. Even Kenneth


Kaunda, leader of the conservative black regime inZambia, was worried about radicalism in the region(and among his own people).

Rhodesia’s Ian Smith proved a difficult leader tosupport, however. After several years of fruitless talks,the guerrilla war resumed with a new intensity in1976. The insurgent forces gained strength whenZANU and ZAPU formed an uneasy alliance calledthe Patriotic Front (PF) and began to receive supportfrom the so-called frontline states of black Africa: An-gola, Mozambique, Botswana, Tanzania, and Zambia.Between 1972 and 1979, the combined forces of thePF grew from a few hundred guerrillas to more than10,000. Meanwhile, the Rhodesian Security Forces(RSF)—divided into a quasi-military police force toguard the cities and areas of white settlement andan army trained in bush warfare—numbered about100,000 well-equipped soldiers and reservists by1979, most of whom by then were black.

The war between the RSF and the PF took on thecharacter of a classic guerrilla struggle. Using its su-perior firepower and air resources—largely providedby South Africa—the RSF conducted search-and-destroy missions against PF guerrillas. Strong as itwas, however, the RSF was hampered by growing ri-valries in its own organization and the developmentof private militias in Rhodesia that became laws untothemselves, conducting looting operations and bru-tally attacking black villages. Among these militiaswere some made up of black warriors, who claimed tofight under the banner of Bishop Abel Murozewa,Smith’s closest ally in the African community, butwere really little more than criminal gangs. Foreignmercenaries—hired by wealthy white farmers to pro-tect their persons and their property—also made anappearance as law and order began disintegrating inthe late 1970s.

For its part, the PF tried to avoid direct encoun-ters with the better-armed RSF, preferring instead toconduct hit-and-run attacks on isolated outposts andacts of sabotage and assassination against white set-tlers, before fading back into Mozambique. They alsoconducted a low-level bombing campaign in thecapital, Salisbury (now Harare), and other white-controlled cities. By 1979, the PF had establishedcontrol over large sections of eastern Zimbabwe,where they conducted political mobilization cam-paigns among the masses of peasants. The war had es-sentially become a stalemate between two roughlyequivalent forces.

Negotiations

As the struggle between black and white forces in-tensified, outside groups were attempting to achievea negotiated settlement. South Africa led the way.Prime Minister John Vorster believed that the Smithregime was losing the war and failing to find creativesolutions to the problem of black majority rule.Vorster feared that an intransigent white minorityregime in Rhodesia might help bring on its own de-feat, resulting in the rise to power of a radical blackregime, much like that in Mozambique and Angola.Vorster and his hard-line successor, P.W. Botha, didnot want Rhodesia’s skilled security apparatus andarmy falling into radical black hands. Instead, Preto-ria wanted to see a negotiated settlement in whichthe black majority would be represented by a man-ageable black leader who would acquiesce in continu-ing white domination.

Calling on the United States—which, in 1976,still maintained close relations with South Africa—Vorster persuaded Secretary of State Henry Kissingerto come to Africa and mediate. After consultationswith the British, who still considered themselves re-sponsible for the Rhodesian situation, Kissinger triedto persuade the Smith regime to accept black major-ity rule, and to get the frontline states’ leaders to re-alize the difference between immediate majority ruleand immediate black power. Kissinger tried to fudgethe difference but failed to convince black Africanleaders to go along. The Kissinger negotiations andsimilar Anglo-American initiatives in 1977 failed tofind a negotiated solution that would satisfy black as-pirations for power and white demands for continueddominance.

Still, Kissinger did reach a deal with Smith inwhich Smith would ceremonially step down and al-low a black prime minister to take his place. InMarch 1978, Smith reached an agreement with theconservative black leader Bishop Able Murozewa,and on June 1, 1979, Murozewa became the firstblack prime minister of the new state of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. But the facade of black rule was notconvincing. The PF and most of the internationalcommunity refused to take seriously a “black major-ity government” in which whites held all key min-isterial posts, only a handful of blacks served asmilitary officers, land reform was not carried out,and most of the segregation laws remained on thebooks.



Time was running out for the white regime. Withmuch of its budget devoted to defense, falling prices forits major mineral exports, and stiffening internationalsanctions, Rhodesia was going bankrupt even as it de-scended into anarchy. The administration was unableto end the war, lift the international sanctions, or im-prove the lives of ordinary blacks in the country. Mean-while, the guerrilla forces of the PF, now secure in theirliberated territories, still proved unable to deliver theknockout blow to the white-controlled regime.

During the summer of 1979, the various partiesto the conflict—under pressure from their respec-tive allies—agreed that a negotiated settlementwas in everyone’s interest. The frontline states—increasingly under attack by Rhodesian forces pur-suing Zimbabwe guerrillas—pushed the PF to thenegotiating table. Meanwhile, hoping to involve thePF in the talks without guaranteeing them control ofa new government, Britain and South Africa workedto push the Murozewa government to accept a deal inwhich a prime-minister-type system—rather than an

executive-dominated one—would continue in a newgovernment that would guarantee the white commu-nity a disproportionate (though not majority) voicein the legislature. This plan, it was hoped, would pre-vent the rise of a powerful and radical black regime inZimbabwe.

Under the chairmanship of the British foreignminister, peace talks began at Lancaster House inLondon on September 10. After fourteen weeks, anagreement was signed in a form largely reflectingBritish and South African wishes. A cease-fire wasimmediately declared and plans for the demobiliza-tion of guerrilla forces put into action. Lord Soames, asenior British diplomat, replaced the Murozewa regimeand directed the transition in preparation for demo-cratic elections including all of Zimbabwe’s blackand white citizens in February 1980.

As the largest guerrilla movement in control ofthe most territory, ZANU decided to run its candi-dates under a banner separate from ZAPU. Severalother parties—including Murozewa’s and Smith’s—

Black nationalist guerrillas loyal to the Zimbabwe African National Union of Robert Mugabe cheer a victory in the fieldin early 1980. Black majority rule came in April, with Mugabe installed as prime minister of the new republic. (PierreHaski/AFP/Getty Images)

also contested the election. While white Rhodesians,South Africans, and the British hoped that anti-ZANU forces would win and form a coalition gov-ernment, they were surprised and disappointed bythe results. ZANU won 63 percent of the vote and 57of the 100 seats in parliament. (Of the latter figure,twenty had been guaranteed to the white commu-nity.) On April 18, 1980, the new black majoritystate of Zimbabwe was officially declared, withZANU leader Robert Mugabe as prime minister.

Zimbabwe Under Majority Rule

The new governing coalition of ZANU and ZAPUfaced a host of problems, the trickiest of which wasland reform. For most Zimbabwean peasants, thestruggle of the last twenty years had largely beenabout winning back the lands they believed had beenstolen from them by white farmers. But due to re-strictions of the Lancaster House accords, continuingdrought in the region, and the need to maintain theforeign earnings brought to the country by white-controlled commercial farming, Mugabe’s govern-ment hesitated. Other problems included ethnictensions between the ruling Shona people and otherblack groups in Zimbabwe, leading to a break-up ofthe ZANU and ZAPU coalition and a turn to ban-ditry by some of the demobilized guerrilla forces thathad served under ZAPU. International problems alsocontinued. Across one border, in Mozambique, the warbetween Frelimo and Renamo continued, and acrossanother border, the struggle against the apartheidsystem in South Africa intensified.

To deal with these problems, the Mugabe gov-ernment adopted a more authoritarian style of rule.In 1987, it eliminated the seats reserved for whitesand enacted constitutional changes that turned thepresidency—once ceremonial—into a powerful exec-utive branch. But the key question of land reformcontinued to bedevil the government. Efforts in 1997

to distribute the large estates of white landowners toblack small-scale farmers produced a storm of contro-versy inside the country and led to a deterioration invalue of the Zimbabwean currency abroad. The re-sulting inflation set off food riots in several cities, in-cluding the capital. As the economy continued itsdownward spiral, thousands of Zimbabweans emi-grated in search of better conditions.

Only Robert Mugabe remained seemingly un-changed. He gained still another re-election in 2002in an election widely believed to be rigged. In 2005elections, his party gained a two-thirds majority in theparliament. Twenty-five years after independence, Mu-gabe was among the longest-serving political leadersin Africa.

James Ciment

See also: People’s Wars; Ethnic and Religious Conflicts;Mozambique: Renamo War, 1976–1992; South Africa: Anti-Apartheid Struggle, 1948–1994.

BibliographyAstrow, André. Zimbabwe: A Revolution That Lost Its Way? To-

towa, NJ: Zed Press, 1983.Caute, David. Under the Skin: The Death of White Rhodesia.

London: Allen Lane, 1983.Chidoda, A.M. Understanding ZANU and the Armed Struggle to

Liberate Zimbabwe. Toronto: Norman Bethune Institute,1977.

Flower, Ken. Serving Secretly: An Intelligence Chief on Record:Rhodesia into Zimbabwe, 1964 to 1981. London: J. Murray,1987.

Gann, Lewis H. The Struggle for Zimbabwe: Battle in the Bush.New York: Praeger, 1981.

Godwin, Peter. “Rhodesians Never Die”: The Impact of War andPolitical Change on White Rhodesia, 1970–1980. New York:Oxford University Press, 1993.

Mungazi, Dickson A. Colonial Policy and Conflict in Zimbabwe:A Study of Cultures in Collision, 1890–1979. New York:Crane Russak, 1992.

Verrier, Anthony. The Road to Zimbabwe, 1890–1980. London:J. Cape, 1986.


330

Zimbabwe, a land-locked country in southern Africa,is known for its scenic beauty and the historic ruinsof a native civilization dating to the twelfth century.It also gained notoriety in the postwar era for violentclashes between white colonizers and native Africansand for later violent conflicts among its African peo-ples. Zimbabwe has an area of about 150,000 squaremiles and a population approaching 13 million.

Until 1965, Zimbabwe was known as SouthernRhodesia and was a colony of Britain. In negotiationsleading toward independence, the British governmenturged Rhodesian leaders to allow full voting rights forthe colony’s black majority. The white minority,which controlled much of the valuable farmland andthe colony’s main businesses, resisted. Finally, underIan Smith, the white minority issued a Unilateral De-claration of Independence, establishing the whiteminority state of Rhodesia, resembling white-ruledSouth Africa, with which it shared a border.

For the next fifteen years, black nationalists foughta guerrilla war to bring majority rule to Rhodesia. Oneof the leaders of the insurgency was the ZimbabweNational Union (ZANU), led by Robert Mugabe. In1979, the white minority government and the black

guerrilla movements signed a British-brokered treatycalling for a democratic vote. The following year,Mugabe was elected president, and the country wasrenamed Zimbabwe.

Mugabe’s administration began with great prom-ise for economic and social success. By the mid-1990s, however, much of the promise had evaporated,as the country sank into a severe economic depressionand experienced widespread human rights violations.As Mugabe continued to use violence to impose hisless than effective policies, opposition grew, bringingincreased violence and economic dislocation. Stu-dents, trade unionists, and homeless people mountedwidespread protests and were in turn suppressed bygovernment forces.

Early Confl icts

Opposition to Mugabe emerged soon after he as-sumed power in 1980. During the following year,the government discovered large stores of armsand ammunition built up by the Patriotic Front-Zimbabwe African People’s Union (PF-ZAPU), anopposition party led by Joshua Nkomo, one of theleaders in the liberation struggle against white mi-nority rule. Mugabe charged PF-ZAPU of plottingto overthrow his government, and Nkomo and hisclosest associates were removed from the presiden-tial cabinet.

In response, Nkomo and PF-ZAPU launched apolitical protest campaign against the government. Ithad its center in Matabeleland in the southwest partof the country, home of the Ndebele people, who rep-resented a minority (about 15 percent) of Zimbabwe’spopulation and were devoted followers of Nkomo andhis party. The protests included violent attacks ongovernment personnel and property, armed theft andeconomic disruption, and harassment of Mugabe’sZANU party members. In addition to insisting thatNkomo and his associates be returned to the cabinet,PF-ZAPU members demanded that the government

ZIMBABWE: Anti-Mugabe StruggleTYPE OF CONFLICT: Popular Uprising

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return farms and other properties it had taken fromPF-ZAPU members.

Mugabe was a member of the majority Shonapeople, who made up more than 80 percent of thecountry’s population. Their homeland was in thenorth and east of the country, where the capital,Harare, is located. Mugabe encouraged a continuingconflict between the Ndebele and the Shona, thoughbefore he came to power, there had been little conflictbetween the two groups. In fact, they had cooperatedin the long struggle for majority rule after 1965.

In 1983 and 1984, the government declared acurfew in parts of Matabelaland and launched a mili-tary campaign against dissidents. The so-called paci-fication campaign, Gukuruhundi (“Strong Wind”),was in fact marked by widespread violence andhuman rights abuses, including at least 20,000 civil-ian deaths. The conflict was resolved when Nkomoagreed to merge his PF-ZAPU party into ZANU in

1987. The enlarged party took the name ZimbabweNational Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF).

Economic Crisis

In January 1992, Mugabe’s government announced afive-year economic plan designed to liberalize theeconomy and reduce the huge budget deficit. Amongthe broad cuts to public spending were major reduc-tions in the funding of education, including the elim-ination of free post-secondary education. In response,massive student demonstrations were held, resultingin the expulsion of 10,000 students from the Univer-sity of Zimbabwe. The expulsions brought on evenlarger demonstrations, which in turn were put downseverely by police. As the economy worsened and un-employment rose to disastrous levels, the Zimbab-wean Congress of Trade Unions became a secondsupporter of mass protest. It declared a general strike,

KEY DATES

1980 After years of fighting, the white minority government of Rhodesia isreplaced by a black majority government, with Zimbabwe African Na-tional Union leader Robert Mugabe as president; the country is re-named Zimbabwe.

1983 The government launches a military campaign in Matabeleland, centerof political opposition to the Mugabe government.

1987 The leader of the opposition Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU),Joshua Nkomo, signs an agreement to merge his party with ZANU,ending the conflict with the government.

1996 Civil servants strike against the government to protest economic poli-cies that strike leaders say are bankrupting the country and impover-ishing its people.

1999 Opposition groups form the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

2000 A referendum granting government officials immunity from prosecu-tion and sanctioning seizure of white-owned farms fails at the polls; inresponse, the government launches a crackdown against oppositiongroups.

2005 With poverty spreading and unemployment estimated at almost 80percent, the government launches Operation Murambatsvina (“SweepOut the Trash”), targeting informal shanty towns around the capital ofHarare.


which gained widespread support but was unsuccess-ful in forcing changes in government policies.

In August 1996, civil servants went on strikeover economic losses that had caused wages to fallby approximately 40 percent in four years. The jobaction eventually won wage gains of 20 percent,a dramatic increase over government proposals of9 percent. Still, rapidly growing unemployment, tomore than 45 percent, sparked new opposition move-ments and increased tension throughout the society.In January 1998, price increases on staple goods setoff days of rioting as thousands of residents raidedshops and businesses in Harare’s suburbs. The armywas eventually called in to regain control. In 1999,after the death of Joshua Nkomo and with socialand economic conditions continuing to deteriorate,opposition to Mugabe and his one-party governmentescalated.

In 2000, the government offered a referendumthat would grant government officials immunity fromprosecution and would sanction the governmentseizure of remaining white-owned farms. Voters de-feated the referendum, causing another violent clamp-down on opposition groups. The “no” vote on thereferendum reflected widespread anger against a net-work of Zimbabwean army veterans who had beenforcibly expropriating farmland previously owned bywhite farmers. The program had brought death or vio-lence not only to white farmers but also to black farm-workers and opposition activists. Critics charged thatthe veterans land expropriation campaign was an at-tempt by the government to divert attention from thefailure of earlier land redistribution projects. Theypointed out that the government controlled approxi-mately 2 million acres of farmland that had beenpromised to small farmers for resettlement but neverdelivered. Instead, it had been given to Mugabe’s alliesand supporters.

The main public opposition to the Mugabe gov-ernment came from the Ndebele-based Movementfor Democratic Change (MDC), which ran candi-dates against the government’s candidates beginningin September 1999. Mugabe’s ZANU-PF accusedMDC of being a front for Western interests, espe-cially the British. Mugabe publicly referred to MDCmembers as traitors, and in 2005 his governmentpassed legislation to prevent party members fromtraveling abroad to meet with supporters in othercountries.

Among the strongest opposition groups wasthe 200,000-member Zimbabwe National StudentsUnion (ZINASU), which repeatedly held mass politi-cal rallies in defiance of the government’s PublicOrder and Security Act. Under that measure, Zimbab-weans were required to apply for police permission forany meeting of three or more people to discuss poli-tics. Despite government surveillance and violent po-lice repression, ZINASU demonstrated openly againstgovernment policies on behalf of the poor. In fact, ZI-NASU advocated more radical policies than the MDCdid, urging that Zimbabwe adopt a kind of interna-tionalist socialism.

By 2005, unemployment in Zimbabwe stood atalmost 80 percent. As the official economy ground toa halt, millions of Zimbabweans became dependenton the unofficial economy, in which barter took theplace of money. Tens of thousands of Zimbabweansfled the country for both economic and politicalreasons, most heading to neighboring South Africa.Meanwhile, international observers urged the SouthAfrican government of Thabo Mbeki to take a harderline against Mugabe. Mbeki replied that quiet diplo-macy rather than tougher measures was more likelyto bring needed reforms to Zimbabwe.

In early 2005, the Mugabe government launchedOperation Murambatsvina (“Sweep Out the Trash”), amassive project to demolish the shantytowns sur-rounding Harare. By the end of the year, more than 1million people had lost their homes or jobs as a resultof the campaign and had become internal refugees.More than 22,000 poor people who survived on ille-gal trade were arrested and their goods confiscated.UN-Habitat, the United Nations agency for humansettlements, declared the campaign a violation ofinternational law; opposition groups contended that itspecifically targeted people who voted against the rul-ing party in March 31 parliamentary elections. Policealso rounded up homeless people and beggars and putthem on forced labor farms. Opponents of the govern-ment suggested that the underlying aim of OperationMurambatsvina was precisely to take away people’slivelihoods and force them into state labor. Eventuallythe humanitarian crisis grew so large that the govern-ment allowed relief agencies into the camps to avoidthousands of deaths from disease and starvation.

Meanwhile, Operation Murambatsvina met withstiff resistance. Residents of the townships outsideHarare put up barricades and fought pitched battles

with police. Organizations such as Women of Zim-babwe Arise (WOZA) and the Zimbabwe Congressof Trades Unions (ZCTU) organized peaceful demon-strations and mass protests. In response, Senior Assis-tant Police Commissioner Edmore Veterai ordered hisofficers to treat the campaign as a war and to respondwith violence.

Amid the political strife and economic despair,Zimbabweans could not help looking to the future.While it seemed unlikely that Mugabe’s hold onpower would soon be shaken, he had turned eightyyears old in 2004, and the people began to ask what

would come of their troubled homeland when he wasno longer on the scene.

Jeffrey A. Shantz

See also: Ethnic and Religious Conflicts; Zimbabwe: Strugglefor Majority Rule, 1965–1980.

BibliographyHill, Geoff. What Happens After Mugabe? Cape Town: Zebra

Press, 2005.Raftopoulos, Brian, and Tyrone Savage, eds. Zimbabwe: Injus-

tice and Political Reconciliation. Cape Town: Institute forJustice and Reconciliation, 2004.

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